The premise of this movie is fascinating. The movie itself is not. The premise: Rural France 1865. A young middle class girl, Josephine Hughes gets abducted by a vagabond with hypnotic powers and is brutally raped and abused. In the court case that follows (a news article about this case was the inspiration) an interesting point arises. Was the girl really hypnotised or was she willing to go “deep in the woods” with this mysterious boy named Timothée Castellan. Fascinating, right?
Not in the hands of Benoît Jacquot. This acclaimed French director managed to make a tedious, conventional and most unforgivingly, boring movie out of this material. An accomplishment in itself. Au fond des bois opens in the arena of the Ardèche, a wild region in the middle of France. It is very clear that the director wants to make a character of the landscape, by emphasising on it in a shot of Josephine with her back towards the camera, which very much remind the paintings of Casper David Friedrich, the German Romantic painter who’s very work concentrates on individuals confronted with the enormity and beauty of savage nature. This notion, nature as a character never takes off besides this very shot I’m describing. The Ardèche simply becomes a wood that never is involved in the story line after this emblematic shot. Then why use such an iconic reference from art history?
There is a scene, at the beginning in which the wanderer, pretending to be a mute, wins the sympathy of the father of the girl, Doctor Hughes that is so condensed to the point of getting ridiculous. Within two minutes the hobo with black teeth coming straight from nowhere in an isolated area is adopted by a seemingly intelligent doctor. This is where the director has lost me, and the movie became an exercise in patience. The reason being that he repeatedly does the same thing in the movie over and over again. The viewer gets to see far too many short scenes in which he has to assume almost everything. The boy circles his finger over a glass of wine, BANG! She’s hypnotised. After being raped I don’t remember how many times she wraps her arms around the tramp while he’s savagely penetrating her, BANG! She’s in love. She awakes in the morning, BANG! She’s out of hypnosis, like she drank too much Hypnosia the night before and awakes sober in the morning with a massive hangover. Come on!
The movie ends with a court case scene (on which the movie is based but lasts about 3 minutes) that does not add anything to the narrative. She smiles at him, but sends him to prison. What does anyone has to make out of that?
The director stated on stage while introducing this film that his inspiration came from the court case against Timothée Castellan. Now there are many movies based on court cases. Personally, I love them because of the exciting nature of these films, guilty or not? The very fabric of this kind of movies is an element of suspense and a search for the truth. Think Rashomon by Kurosawa or The Crucible by Hytner, which successfully builds suspense and excitement around the court case about presumed supernatural powers, contrary to the court scene in Au fond des bois. This film lacks that element of suspense. I should have been on the edge of my seat at the all- revealing court scene, instead of slumped in it praying this movie soon would be over.
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