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Directed By
Xavier Gens
Written By:
Xavier Gens
Cast:
Karina Testa, Patrick Ligardes, David Saracino, Maud Forget, Samuel Le Bihan, Chems Dahmani, Jean-Pierre Jorris, Yannick Dahan, Joël Lefrançois, Rosine Favey, Adel Bencherif
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Frontier(s) (Frontière(s)) (2008)
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Movie Review by Jarrod
May 20th, 2008
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'Frontiers', from Hitman director Xavier Gens, contains more savage depictions of violence than even Hostel, a movie it borrows from liberally, both in terms of its premise, and one particularly nasty scene where a man's Achilles' tendons are cut, to prevent him from running away. I am not sure if this film deserved the NC-17 rating, but at least the MPAA seemed willing to bestow that rating on violence alone; it was supposed to be part of last year's Horrorfest, then it had its own brief theatrical run, and was released on DVD in an unrated version on May 13. Gens is not interested in entertaining or scaring his audience; instead, he wants to make them squirm and feel uncomfortable, and I think he more or less succeeds. The plot involves a group of Parisian youths who steal some money during a chaotic period of instability in France; the police are busy trying to control the riots that have broken out following the election of a right-wing government, presumably one that holds the views of Jean-Marie Le Pen on non-white immigration and other racial issues. Yasmine (Karina Testa) is three months pregnant, considering abortion; the father of her baby is most likely her ex-boyfriend Alex (Aurelien Wiik). Yasmine has joined her brother, Alex, and two other guys, Tom (David Saracino) and Farid (Chems Dahmani) in stealing the money, and they all plan to head to Holland. But Yasmine's brother is shot and winds up dying in the hospital. Tom and Farid go on ahead, finding a little inn near the border of Luxembourg, so they decide to spend the night and wait for Yasmine and Alex.
The inn is run by a family of depraved neo-Nazis; the patriarch of this twisted brood is some Third Reich reject named Von Geisler (Jean-Pierre Jorris), a sick old man who dreams of breeding Aryan babies, and maintaining the purity of his family's blood. This is not given much attention, however, until Yasmine falls into his clutches and he realizes she is pregnant. Von Geisler speaks French, but also a bit of German, which is not subtitled, so a few German phrases here and there will go untranslated. The German is there only to remind us that he is a Nazi, if we forget, though he does dress like one. His offspring includes two (or is it three) sons; Karl (Patrick Ligardes), Goetz (Samuel Le Bihan), and Hans (Joel Lefrancois). Hans is the butcher; his role becomes more apparent when you realize that the Von Geisler clan engages in cannibalism, and when one spots Tom hanging upside down with meat hooks in his feet. Karl and Goetz are psychopaths who are tasked with hunting down and killing any victim that manages to escape. There are also three women; Gilberte, Klaudia, and Eva. Eva was actually abducted from her real parents, and has produced children for Von Geisler, but all of them have been deformed in some way, and now live in an abandoned mine, where they move around like animals. These "children" are supposed to remind us of the creatures from The Descent, but have no relevance otherwise. Gens conjures up The Descent in another scene where has Tom and Farid crawl through a very small tunnel, as Farid spots something following behind them.
The Nazis themselves are metaphorical stand-ins for far-right French political parties; and how they seek to purge Arabs, Africans, and maybe even Jews from France, to make it more ethnically homogenous, more racially pure. Farid is a Muslim, probably from Morocco or Algeria, and Karl refers to him derogatorily as the "rag head". Von Geisler expresses concern about Yasmine's mixed racial heritage. Goetz takes notice when Farid says he doesn't eat pork for religious reasons, asking him if he is Jewish. So, there is at least a message here, a statement Gens is hoping to make. He obviously criticizes the more extreme elements of French conservatism, comments on the very real racial tensions in French society (there have been young Muslim immigrants from the former French empire who have rioted and protested because of the discrimination they face), criticizing police brutality, and attitudes within French culture that are eerily similar to those espoused by the Nazis. I may be reading more into this than Gens expected, but this is a torture porn flick with a surprising amount of strong thematic content. It is a messy, cruel, and nihilistic film, gratuitous, gross, and unsettling, but this is probably what Gens intended. It is indulgent and overlong at roughly 110 minutes, but it does trump its like-minded predecessor High Tension, which helped to illustrate that the French can possibly match the Americans when it comes to masochistic fascinations and impulses.
It is more or less predictable, with the heroine, Yasmine, blasting her way to freedom, and I mean blasting literally, she wields a shotgun in the final frames, survives an explosion, then mud wrestles with Gilberte. She outsmarts her tough male pursuers, who sorely underestimate her. Perhaps the most revolting scene for me personally was the one where Farid is trapped in a steam chamber, his gradually fleshless face visible through the small circular window. This was like a Holocaust image of some kind, and it just struck the wrong note, whether Gens intended it or not.
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