When I sat down and watched Phillippe Grandrieux’s debut feature Sombre in March of this year, the opening minutes filled me with a feeling that I, as a part-time enthusiast of extreme cinema, often seek out—that is to say total dread and destabilisation. In recent times I’ve felt this way about a couple of films, Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover and Antoine D’Agata’s Aka Ana for example, but none that I can recall being as immediately threatening as Sombre. It’s hard to articulate why because, as laden with horrific violence as Sombre is, it doesn’t open violently, but it does give you the distinct feeling that this filmmaker is not my friend. Me being me, this led me down the Philippe Grandrieux rabbit hole.
His latest (and given his total lack of interest in acquiescing to commercial tastes, one suspects final) feature, Despite The Night from 2015, is something I’ve been thinking about every day since I saw it . To my mind, it’s not just a great film, but I suspect a rewatch might confirm that it’s one of the best films of the 21st century.
As avant-garde and strange as it is, it does gesture towards a plot (although I’d be lying if I said I followed it completely) involving two main characters, a man and a woman. The man, Lenz, played by Kristian Marr, has returned to Paris to find his lost love. Ariane Labed plays Hélène, who is not this lost love, but ends up becoming entangled with Lenz anyway. Given Grandrieux’s general tenor, it’s unsurprising that what could be the set-up of an awards-bait romance on the banks of the Seine is instead a conveyor belt through a grimy world of child death, extreme pornography, and snuff films, a narrative presented in such a formally fractured way that trying to follow it can feel like half-listening to a conversation being had in another room.
It’s hard to know where to start with unpacking my response to this film, because it feels like such a monolithic work, dense and opaque and generally inscrutable. My reaction to it as I was watching was basically slack-jawed awe, and a feeling that I was seeing a genuine one-of-a-kind work. The closest (or at least most obvious) comparison in its macabre dreaminess is David Lynch, but to say it’s like a David Lynch film would be doing it a disservice.
It has a loose, episodic, and free-associative feeling that is not miles away from David Lynch, but without being filtered through Lynch’s oddball humour and sense of irony. As dark as Lynch’s films can be, Grandrieux’s oeuvre feels much more unsparing—he has no interest in the sorts of ironic distancing effects that Lynch gleefully (and very skillfully) deploys.
Whereas Lynch’s Lost Highway shows brief glimpses of the hybrid porno-murder films that its villainous characters are producing, Despite The Night not only plunges headfirst into that world, but dares to find it appealing on some base level, even as it simultaneously depicts it as a total moral abomination.
This sums up the troubling appeal of Grandrieux’s work, his films are completely devoted to achieving a kind of intimate, tactile and pleasurable sensation in every single scene as an aesthetic goal, and this includes rendering abject evil as a thing of beauty. As Adrian Martin writes in A Magic Identification with Forms: Philippe Grandrieux in the Night of Artaud, the cinema of Grandrieux is “a matter of intensities, essentially emotional in nature…such intensities first of all arise from bodily sensations, which then reach deep into the churning drives and phantasms of the human psyche”.
The horrors of his films are not merely Saw-esque depictions of extremity in pursuit of the kind of one-dimensional shock response that often draws people to horror films (and which I am not immune to!) Instead they feel like images drawn from the deepest parts of the subconscious and then filmed, regardless of their moral valence: the only thing that matters to Grandrieux is that they are charged with feeling, and that this provides them with beauty.
That is not to say that Grandrieux is only interested in rendering images of abuse and cruelty, that would be too much of a generalisation. For example, his film Un Lac does not contain any acts of violence and yet it feels unmistakably like his handiwork, because it retains the almost smothering closeless to the subjects that is his trademark. Situated somewhere between the relative delicacy of Un Lac and the suffocating bleakness of Sombre is Despite The Night (although it is undoubtedly closer to the latter). In Despite The Night love appears to be real and even worthwhile, as miraculous as this may seem in a world full of torture and sexual degradation. In amongst the muck there are brief moments of tenderness between various characters that are genuinely touching, and serve to clarify that Grandrieux is a serious artist interested in more than just extremity for its own sake.
Ariane Labed’s performance is the glue that holds the disparate threads of the film together, as she carries a kind of honesty and emotional sensitivity through the various scenes of debasement and cruelty that Hélène (willingly) finds herself in. There is a scene early on where she has a rendezvous in the woods with a bearded pornographer (who seems to serve as a kind of corrupting, Satan-like figure in the film) and allows him to violently brutalise her during sex.
It’s a deeply unpleasant scene and one where the camera’s proximity to the performers is almost invasive. Labed’s face and body fill the screen so entirely that Grandrieux’s handheld camera loses focus at times, and the harsh lighting borders on overexposed. Nothing about it feels cinematic in the traditional sense, it’s too immediate for that. It speaks volumes about Labed as a performer that she wouldn’t shy away from this scene, in which she displays an extraordinary and discomfiting level of vulnerability, and also about the quality of the director—the cast trust that Grandrieux’s project has loftier goals than the sort of post-August Underground sludge this could be mistaken for.
On a formal level I think Despite The Night is Grandrieux’s strongest work even though it’s clearly being made on a low budget. The sound is dense and textured in a way that suggests an uncommon attention to detail, and the image is hyper-specific and rigorously designed whilst somehow feeling totally offhand and unfussy at the same time. He layers ambience and music and several different shots simultaneously in a way that feels in some ways like a throwback to the earliest days of cinema, when technique and cinema grammar was more malleable and not-yet-defined, but also feels quintessentially 21st century—this is filmmaking in the age of Premiere Pro.
Unlike Grandrieux’s older work, the film is shot digitally, and there is absolutely no attempt to make it look like celluloid in some sort of notion towards the history of cinema and its traditional aesthetics. As much as he cites mid-century filmmakers like Dreyer, Straub, and Huilliet as influences, he has undoubtedly made a film for the age of camcorders, iPhones and amateur internet porn.
Despite The Night feels like a reminder that amongst all the genuinely disheartening developments in film over the last decade, it is still possible for genius to strike, and for the moving image to express the inexpressible in a way that no other artform can do as directly. Sometimes a camera and two people huddled in the dark is all you need.