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| Images courtesy of Radiance Films |
Decades before Aris Iliopulos’ career began and ended with
the posthumous adaptation of Ed Wood’s unfilmed screenplay for I Woke Up
Early the Day I Died which saw it’s star-studded cast doing nothing but
making feral grunts and groans in lieu of spoken dialogue, French
actor-director Claude Faraldo did it with a bloodthirsty sardonic vengeance in
his 1973 gibberish laden social satire Themroc. Picked up by Radiance Films for the world
blu-ray premiere in a new 4K restoration with plentiful extras including
interviews with leading actor Michel Piccoli and director Faraldo, this
anarchic tearing down of the walls literally and conceptually functioned as
something of a precursor to what would or wouldn’t evolve into the New French Extreme
movement. In debatably the Belle De
Jour actor Piccoli’s most depraved and unhinged role since his flatulating
bourgeoisie in Italy’s La Grande Bouffe that same year, Themroc
is a bit like watching a volcanic eruption in real time, rumbling quietly
before erupting into an open-jawed conflagration.
In the wordless world of Themroc the titular house
painter and bachelor played by Michel Piccoli lives with his mother at home. After a typical morning of lusting after his
half-naked sister in one of the film’s early subversive activities, Themroc
goes to work leading an ordinary quiet life interspersed with grunts and groans
until mid-shift after a run-in with his boss the man violently rebels. Proceeding to smash up his home including but
not limited to throwing all of his personal belongings out the window before
taking a sledgehammer to carve out the walls, swat teams are called in to try
and quell the chaos which inexplicably seems to be spreading from house to
house as onlookers join suit in Themroc’s hard hitting of the reset
button. Becoming like a feral cave man, Themroc’s
antics eventually lead towards incest, murder and even cannibalism and soon the
neighbors joining in on the fun band together in a kind of seductive hippie
cult.
A blistering, uncompromising, unfriendly social satire that’s
equal parts funny, shocking and deliberately wavering between aggravation and
hilarity, Themroc while being French is perhaps best remembered for
Channel 4’s British televised Red Triangle broadcast which screened the film
for adults only. While a commercial
success in its native country with the ever-prolific Michel Piccoli diving
headfirst into a role that proved to be physically demanding if not dangerous
with the actors walking alongside real subway trains just a few feet away, Themroc
is the kind of anarchic take-no-prisoners transgressive atonal jaunt you’d
expect from Lindsay Anderson with his Mick Travis trilogy and later Stanley
Kubrick with A Clockwork Orange. Often
filled with outlandish often Cro-Magnon-like feral behaviors with more than a
little overtly chauvinistic attitude towards its female characters, Themroc is
something of a blurred mirrored image of contemporary society with the
heightened realism cranked up past the point of absurdity.
Featuring an ensemble cast including Piccoli in a tour de force
of acting, Beatrice Romand, Coluche and even Miou-Miou, the anarchic vision is
aided by Safety Catch cinematographer Jean-Marc Ripert in 1.66:1,
frequently resorting to gritty handheld photography with a thick-as-carpet
grain structure beautifully represented by the 4K scan. The score by Nosferatu Phantom Der Nacht sound
and music department head Harald Maury is understated with occasional forays
into subtle cues though largely the soundscape of Themroc is comprised
of gibberish and animal-like noises uttered by the film’s ensemble cast. While Piccoli is shouldering this ship,
everyone around him dives freely into the film’s peculiar logic and sense of
reality. That such established actors
would so freely dive into the cinematic equivalent of a food fight with baby
noises for sound is kind of a wonderment in and of itself.
A wild and countercultural vision with subtle hints at the
French riots that were happening around the country in the transition between
the 1960s and 1970s, Themroc and debatably it’s kid cousin La Grande
Bouffe both starring Piccoli didn’t appear in 1973 cinemas so much as they
detonated a bomb inside them. Expressions
of pure cinema not driven by plot where anything and everything over the top
and transgressive could happen in the name of social satire, as cult movies
they haven’t lost any of their potency to time even in the age of provocative
cinematic overstimulation we’re currently living in. Claude Faraldo sadly never made a film of
this incendiary power ever again, instead focusing on television and more
traditional narratives that have been forgotten to time. But with Themroc, a film that sticks
out like a sore thumb in the landscape of cult transgressors, it is undeniably Faraldo’s
finest hour, a film that defies easy categorization or digestion which nevertheless
speaks to a rebellious animalistic impulse percolating in all of us.
--Andrew Kotwicki
