Emiliano Rocha Minter's transgressive
first feature We Are The Flesh arrives
in America this week courtesy of the cult cinema connoisseurs at
Arrow Video, after months of frightened, word-of-mouth whispers. The
buzz was that this Mexican indie would be something intense,
something extreme, and something different, but what was most
different about it was that the buzz wasn't just happening among the
extreme-transgressive-horror crowd, but among respected auteurs like
Alejandro González
Ináritu
and Alfonso Cuarón.
This immediately piqued my interest. Often I look at horror films
that dub themselves “transgressive” with quite a bit of
skepticism that easily turns into disdain. Too often they end up
being exercises in gratuitous shock for the sake of gratuitous shock,
which simply want to be extreme and push buttons for no deeper reason
than wanting to make people squirm; the illegitimate children of
stuff like Cannibal Holocaust,
which I consider the most repugnant offender of this. It's a shame,
because when a film is transgressive in service of well-thought-out,
artistically-strong thematic reasons that are not just gratuitous,
the results can be something transformative and unique – see the
works of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ken Russell, and Peter Greenaway for
the ultimate examples of this – but that possibility seems to be
very rarely realized. With high praise coming from the likes of
Ináritu
and Cuarón,
could We Are The Flesh
be that rare sort of film that is actually transgressive in the
service of artistically-important, deeper reasons? I had to find out.
The answer? I think it is. Minter's film is about as extreme and
disturbing as I had expected, but it seems to be that way not just
because it delights in extremity (although to be sure, it does), but
because it wants to get at a deeper, existential truth about the
cruelty of humanity, and possibly the cruelty devouring people in the
filmmaker's home country of Mexico in particular. While I cannot put
it in the same league as the masterworks of Russell, Jodorowsky, and
Greenaway (but then again, very few films are in that league), it is
a fascinating and hypnotic film in its own right; a philosophically
bleak fever-dream with shades of Jodorowsky, Georges Bataille, the
Marquis de Sade, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Now
that that list of influences has either piqued your curiosity or
caused you to start slowly backing away in horror, let's take a
closer look at what's beneath Minter's Flesh.
It follows two late-teen/early-twentysomething siblings living in
what appears to be the crumbling shell of a post-apocalyptic,
apparently deserted Mexican city. They stumble upon the lair of a
very weird and creepy stranger, and strike a deal with him: they can
live with him and eat his food, if they help him in the construction
of the bizarre man-made cave he is building, and join him in the
unrestrained indulgences and depravities he intends to carry out
there. What follows from that set-up is less a narrative in the
conventional sense, and more a surreal nightmare with an unhinged
internal logic even more mad than the crumbled society that the two
siblings have apparently fled from. The whole thing feels like a
twisted metaphor, with the three principle actors appearing perhaps
as concepts or philosophical representations rather than characters
in the narrative sense, and with the space of the film becoming
increasingly less a real place and more an internal state
externalized. The cave the characters create changes the set from a
building in a crumbled city to a representation of perhaps the cavern
of a skull or perhaps a womb, but either way a place within the
equally-in-shambles body of the mad stranger. This host of the den of
depravity, Mariano, is an embodiment of both hedonism and nihilism; a
combination of Marquis de Sade, Aleister Crowley, and Coffin Joe
(from the series of notorious Brazilian cult films), who snarls
quasi-Nietzschean philosophy through a sick grin and wild eyes. Of
the two siblings, the brother seems to symbolize innocence and/or
repression, and the sister seems to symbolize curiosity, longing, and
uninhibited sexuality, but all of those attributes are things that
Mariano delights in being able to get his claws in and corrupt.
This
is a film about the darkest impulses that humans are capable of,
exposed at their most raw by immersing its characters in the abyss
that Mariano creates, and letting it consume them; by turning them
into (as the title suggests) mere flesh in a nihilistic void. As one
would imagine, this journey takes the film to some very dark and
very twisted
places, involving brutal violence and explicit, unsimulated sex. It
is a very boundary-pushing movie, in a way that plenty of viewers
just won't be ready for; not just because of the literal content
involved (although plenty will find that shocking in itself), but
because of the powerfully nihilistic feeling that the content is used
to create. This is one grim movie: watching it evoked a similar
feeling to when I saw E. Elias Merhige's Begotten for
the first time, and I was left nearly as haunted afterward. It's the
sort of film that I'm not sure one really enjoys
per se, but that one experiences, for better or for worse. But while
I'm not sure I enjoyed it, I'm glad I saw it, because I felt that it
passed the strict test that I always hold a project like this to: is
it shocking me just to shock, or is it shocking me to make me feel
something, or think about something?
This
does not feel like a movie that is pushing buttons just to push them;
the disturbing content is there for a reason, and it does not exist
in a vacuum, but in the context of Mariano's nihilistic musings, and
in the context of how the two siblings are transformed by the
transgressions they go through. In a general sense, we see humanity
stripped away of all morality and societal politeness, and reduced to
whatever darkness might exist at its core; an existential horror tale
with the dark underbelly of human nature as the monster. But in a
specific sense, there is a very strong feeling that Minter is
commenting on the state of violence, cruelty, and corruption in
Mexican society. It is no accident that he has very clearly set this
in a nightmare version of his home country, and one gets the
impression that what we see in the cave is a microcosm of what he
fears is happening to the society around him. Equally deliberate, and
equally developed with an eye for more than just gratuitousness, is
the film's aesthetic. This is a very well-shot movie, with a
striking, dream-like color palette, and haunting cinematography that
occasionally plays with the aspect ratio for dramatic effect. The
bizarre set is also extremely well-designed, and the fact that we see
it in large part built by the characters on-screen adds an unusual diegetic twist to the deliberately artificial art style.
Still,
especially for a first feature, there is something undeniably
spellbinding about the nightmarish world of We Are The
Flesh. Yes it is flawed, but
those who appreciate films like this will find plenty worth puzzling
over, and the dark artistry of Minter's visuals are worth a look in
themselves. Of course, it should be abundantly clear by now that this
is not a movie for everyone; plenty of people will find this film too
extreme (or just too pervasively dark) for their tastes. But for
those who are up for it, I found We Are The Flesh
to be a mostly-successful example of a transgressive film whose
transgressions are thematically and artistically justified enough to
be worth the journey.
Score:
-
Christopher S. Jordan
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