Reviews

The three female characters in Claire Denis' willfully obscure – visually as well morally, but also plot-wise - spin on the often exploitative genre of the revenge film, look eerily alike. Much to the confusion of some viewers, but there's a thematic reasoning behind this casting choice.

Before I delve further into this, I'd like to consider the generic conventions of the revenge film and how they relate to Les Salauds. Convention dictates that a male protagonist, a lone wolf, returns to what is often his home town to avenge some evil done to his family or someone that was once close to him where institutionalized authority – police, justice – has failed.

Although often not without moral ambiguity usually there's a sense of exploitative glorification of violence inherent to the genre's an eye for an eye ethics. In Les Salauds however the violence is dimly lit, often clumsy – not unlike a real fight. There are no one punch knock-outs, or drawn out choreography, just awkward, quickly dissolving scuffles that leave the chain-smoking protagonist gasping for air.

As is illustrated by her depiction of violence Denis' film can admittedly be described within the vague generic outlines of the revenge film, but she skillfully uses its tropes to tell a story that is much more morally complex, that raises more questions than it answers - for the male protagonist as well as the audience - but even more so she uses this intrinsically male narrative and retells it by foregrounding the feminine characters.

Marco has fled from the world of femininity leaving behind his wife, sister, daughters, niece and a family business of women's (!) shoes. After returning to his past he's never able to clearly see what he's gotten himself into - the truth is as obscure as the film's visual style – and his actions are motivated by the connection he has to the three main female characters.

What binds these women – as a group, but in a sense also as individuals – is their passivity. Yet their submissiveness is not unambiguous, as they make a more or less deliberate choice to subjugate themselves to a dominant male. Their relationship to the males is, albeit somewhat masochistically, to a degree symbiotic.

Although the motives of every character in this film are murky and veiled, the viewer can infer what the women have to gain from their position of passiveness: a glamorous lifestyle and a child that's well taken care of (Raphalle), the possibility to attribute your downfall and moral failure as a mother to the (absent) male other (Sandra), or the hazy seduction of amorous and druggy transgressions (Justine).

If these women act, running away or even if they fire a gun – which could be considered the ultimate act – they do so to ultimately solidify their position of dependence on some male 'salaud', bastard.

In the beginning of the film there's a scene in a lecture hall which - besides being aesthetically pleasing, all those kids gently lit by their notebook screens, like a counterweight to the neon saturated fever dream that will follow - serves a thematic purpose: the class is on the African Americans's equal rights movement, and it's the narrative of emancipatory movements that Korine subverts in Spring Breakers.

The film boasts four leading female characters; two of them are shown to be drawn to violence and they go from mimicking guns with their hands and filling up squirt guns with booze - consider the significance of firing those phallic instruments into your own mouth - to robbing a diner, also with a play gun, but with very real results. Ultimately it enables the girls to go to Miami - which, not by coincidence, is Tony Montana's stomping ground in Scarface.

So let's analyse this some more. There's a party scene in the beginning of the film, that shows one of the lead females playing craps and taking the money. Playing craps is a trope in roughly 90's hip hop culture - more on that later - and a typically masculine pass time. The robbery too sees - although we initially don't get to see more than the occasional glance through the window - the females adopting a souped up masculine, criminal machismo. We see them acting out an a-moral fantasy of masculinity, all the while physically stressing their femininity.

Fast forward to Miami. We're introduced to Alien, a white rapper/criminal - another trope in 90's hip hop culture: the 'gangsta' rapper, the hustler, the pimp - sporting corn rows and a grill, who was raised in a black neighborhood and who's turned the cartoonish gangsta tales Dr Dre raps about into a lifestyle. 'look at all my s_hit,' is Alien's materialistic mantra, 's_hit' signifying his dope, guns and money - and apparently his, continuously played, Scarface (!) DVD. He's basically a white caricature of an of itself caricatural branch of hip hop culture.

And what does Alien do: he buys the women. Then there's a key scene. When Alien's about to subject the ladies, who are at this point essentially his slaves, to his male dominance, the roles are reversed and the girls 'pimp' the pimp, penetrating him with his own (!) guns – no need for an extensive knowledge of Freudian symbolism to interpret this . The male character is subjugated via phallic penetration – BTW sexuality and violence/guns are linked from the beginning not only visually, but also acoustically, i.e. the recurring sound of a single gunshot - and the typical 'gangsta' scenario of hyper-masculinity, of male superiority, is inverted, turned inside out, in other words: the gender roles are reversed.

What, I think, Korine is doing here, is dismantling the misogynistic mythology that dominated a significant part of 90's hip hop culture, and assembling it again in the context of female emancipation. In other words: the narrative that was used to objectify and subjugate women, is now used by women to quite the opposite end.

It's no big surprise then, that the film that's so overly present in rap music, is quoted in the surrealistic ending of the film; Scarface's ending is basically turned on its head. I don't think this scene, in which the females are shown to definitively put an end to the perverted amoral dream of male dominance, literally gunning it down, should be interpreted metaphorically per se, but there's surely something to be said for not reading it exclusively literally. The ending symbolically completes this tale of emancipation: the two female leads penetrate the bastion of male superiority and tear it down by using the exact same myths, symbols, or weapons that were used to establish it in the first place.