Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Marc Fouchard
Starring: Kévin Mischel, Aurélia Poirier, June Assal, Dominique Frot
Let’s hear it for the cinema of the damaged white male with a troubled
soul and dangerous edge. There’s only been actual thousands of films
celebrating this archetype; where masculinity is presented as at once
toxic but ultimately idealised, and the anxieties of its audience are
cossetted, along with their grimy power fantasies cathartically fulfilled.
What’s one more? Marc Fouchard’s
Out Of This World knows its pedigree: its alienated
protagonist is a Taxi Driver, who experiences a subjective reality ala
Patrick Bateman, and also has a seemingly helpless propensity for enacting
stylised violence (like any bloke in a Nicolas Winding Refn flick). The
problem is that this dance and death drama doesn’t quite have the style,
insight or knowing humour of its domineering influences. Potential
spoilers ahead...
Kévin Mischel plays Léo (blandly gorgeous: think Kit Harrington
hung out to drip dry for too long), a taxi driver who takes fares in
between creating music on a laptop studio. His customers are by turn warm,
passive or actively rude: one female passenger mid-phone call asks for him
to turn down the awful music he is playing. It is, of course, Léo’s jam on
the speakers - oops! He cuts a desultory figure, does Léo. An agent for
other’s destiny as he conveys people from one part of their lives to the
next, he is already liminal. He’s so shy, too. We are encouraged to have a
certain sympathy for him when he falls for deaf passenger Amélie (Aurélia Poirier), and as he awkwardly shadows her to a studio where we discover she is a
dancer. Léo, who the film has established as socially inept, spies on her
as she throws herself about the dance space in a manner late '70s Kate
Bush might have balked at for being a bit ‘big’. It IS a bit odd the way
Léo watches her. Perhaps even creepy. But the narrative has presented us
with two potentially recoverable lost souls - a deaf dancer/a reticent
musician - and the romantic thing to do is to root for is their inevitable
union, right?
But when they met, it was murder. Problem is it turns out Léo is a right
fucking psycho who abducts women in his cab before killing them to death.
Léo! We were rallying for you, son! His first in-film victim is the in-cab
music critic from earlier - there is no
Theatre of Blood style ironic retribution though, just a sad
and sordid stabbing which culminates in a body dumped in a river.
Pointedly, Léo’s violent nature is only revealed after we’ve invested in
the prospective love story, and in him as an underdog protagonist.
Furthermore, as it continues, the film positions Léo’s attacks and
misogyny as compulsive, almost as if he has no control over himself. For
me there was something deeply problematic about this paradigm, the blithe
suggestion that Léo is somehow a victim, too. This reading is facilitated
by how stylised the film is, and if the violence is not presented as
exciting it is certainly positioned as elegiac, suggesting Léo and the
film itself is wistfully repentant of the grim spectacle they enact. It
rests uneasy.
Your acceptance of ideology may vary, but what is perhaps more pertinent
is how unconvincing Out Of This World comes across as at
times. As a serial killer who can’t help acting on impulse, Léo’s
sloppiness would surely have the gendarmes breathing down his neck tout
suite. There’s a sort-of get out clause where occasionally the narrative
fakes us and it transpires that the bad murder Léo just done was all in
his head (an absolute cinema pet hate of mine), but this
American Psycho-esque unreliable subjectivity doesn’t work out because we know that Léo
DOES kill women, and in ways that are frankly unrealistic, anyway. It’s an
affectation, empty cinematic posturing.
On that tip, throughout the plot, as Léo’s desires intensify, we see
Amélie doing her dancing from afar. She enacts the sort of moves you’d see
in a Sia video; contemporary dance composed of shapes and sweeps and rise
and fall. It’s the sort of motion which, deployed expertly and within the
right contexts, can be devastating in its emotional resonance, but
otherwise does run the risk of looking a bit silly and pretentious. A
fitting style for this film, then, with its off-kilter presentations of
male anxieties, clumsy serial killer chic and icky romanticising of its
lonesome murderer.
Out Of This World is on UK/ROI VOD
from December 5th.
