Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Vegetarian-to-cannibal trip will make your flesh crawl
LONDON: Julia Ducournau is the new scream queen. When Raw screened at midnight at the Toronto film festival an ambulance was called to the cinema after spectators fainted.
But what makes Ducournau different from previous scream queens is that the 33-year-old Parisian is not the damsel in distress, but the writer and director of the year’s coolest movie.
Raw sees 16-year-old vegetarian Justine (Garance Marillier) eat meat for the first time during fresher’s week at vet school. Then she gets a taste for human flesh.
But to think of Raw as a cannibal movie would ignore the fat on the bone. Beyond the hazing, gory veterinary lessons and the macabre is a movie about sisterhood, womanhood and how society gazes at the female form.
“Cannibalism is really interesting because it goes with my body obsessions,” says Ducournau.
She explains that this is not about how fabulous she looks, or her diet: “For me when you talk about the body, you talk about much more than the body – you talk about the human condition. So for me the film questions the human condition, it’s about mortality, about how do we represent death?”
Her goal with the film was to make audiences have a physical reaction: “Then you have shared something with your neighbour in the cinema.”
And she has succeeded in taking us on a roller-coaster ride. At the end of the film I looked at the woman sitting next to me, and let out a nervous laugh by way of apologising for all my squealing and cringing.
So does Ducournau have a beef with vegetarians? She says: “Her being vegetarian is just a storytelling tool. If you’re going to have a character become a cannibal, it’s good to have her be the complete reverse of that at the start of the story.”
She chose cannibalism because she “wanted to make a movie about a character who would be relatable and likeable and who in the middle of the movie would do an act that is usually qualified as inhuman.
“My challenge was to make the audience feel empathy for her… feel for her while in social anthropology there are three taboos of humanity: murder, incest and cannibalism.”
Her parents are doctors. The action of her film takes place in a vet school, where it’s animals rather than humans being treated. When it came to shooting scenes, she put the actors in real life situations: horses being put to sleep and on one occasion we get to see Justine put her arm into a cow’s posterior.
Of course, mixing real moments with a fiction has its dangers. There is no second take but thankfully for the director, no one passed out while the camera was rolling.
Everywhere in the movie, there are questions being asked of our prejudices and perceptions. Justine’s room-mate is gay and the film breaks many gender stereotypes. These can be as simple as seeing sisters play video games together with no men in sight:
The problems she unpicks are universal and it’s why Raw has travelled so well: “It’s worldwide and it’s been like this since the beginning of humanity. I think there is something to do against this, and that’s why in the end... I didn’t want to tick boxes about building your own identity. It’s a movie about escaping determinism.”
Her next movie will be about a serial killer: I’m already scared. – The Independent