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Delphine Gleize’s chimerical, sometimes contrived, but always uncanny first feature won’t make anyone a fan of bullfighting, but it will make the brutal ritual more comprehensible. Fans of imaginative, innovative, and original filmmaking, meanwhile, will delight in this caprice about the serendipity of random events, the irony of fate, and the importance of drawing good circles at the age of five. A little girl provides the skewed center for a cat’s cradle of mysteriously connected lives and deaths. Winnie (Raphaëlle Molinier), who’s been criticized by her teacher Jeanne (Lucía Sánchez) for making the animals bigger than the people in her classroom sketch, watches raptly on the TV as the young Spanish torero Victor (Julien Lescarret) enters the ring for his first fight. She notes that the 1000-pound Andalusian brute named Romero dwarfs his teenage opponent, proving that Winnie’s drawing is right. The viewer notes that her pink tights match the torero’s, and that when the bull makes his pass on the TV screen, Winnie’s Great Dane Fred passes by in the same way, indicating not only that the bull and Winnie and everyone else in the movie are bound together but that Gleize is a visual poet and a master of editing and mise-en-scène. The encounter ends badly for both torero and bull, and the latter undergoes a clinical sparagmos: flayed and dismembered and its parts distributed across the continent. The eyes are sent off to the University of Brussels for Jacques (Jacques Gamblin), a researcher who resents his needy, neurotic wife’s pregnancy. The bones end up in a supermarket in Northern France, where struggling actress Carlotta (Chiara Mastroianni) poses as a señorita to sell them in a degrading promotion. The horns become a birthday present for a lonely taxidermist from his doddering mother (shades of Psycho). And Winnie and her Great Dane Fred are never more than a degree of separation away. Each recipient lacks something, or everything, in his or her life, and the fragmented body of the sacrificed bull fulfills them, in unexpected and sometimes unwanted ways. As that description suggestions, Carnages can lapse into painfully literal allegory. It’s at its best when the logic it follows is intuitive and associative, even absurd. Gleize demonstrates an appreciation of synchronicity, fate, and human folly akin to that of Robert Altman in his Nashville days or Krzysztof Kieslowski circa La double vie de Véronique. Her balance of the macabre and the whimsical is like Buñuel without the icy distance or the bitter edge. She could use some of the latter: Carnages at times gets precious and contrived. But whenever it threatens to curdle into confection, Gleize will summon up a wondrous image — a chorus of burn victims singing in an empty church, or a little boy rolling a pair of bovine eyeballs on the floor as if they were cat’s-eye marbles — that announces a formidable talent entering the ring. In French with English subtitles.
BY PETER KEOUGH
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