Part of Hoop-Tober 2016

“If he wanted to kill you, he'd already have done it.”

Jean-Luc Godard, the John Lennon of the French New Wave (McCartney: François Truffaut; Harrison: Éric Rohmer; Starr: Roger Vadim), once said (via Le Petit Soldat), “The cinema is truth 24 times a second. And every cut is a lie.” As with so many Godard quotes, it is enigmatic enough to be unassailably true. The camera can only capture what is in front of it, creating a permanent record of a sort of (heavily manipulated) reality, while the editing process gives that record shape and structure and much (if not all) of its meaning. So much of the power of film comes from its verisimilitude—something unachievable by the theater or the novel. Whether in the form of Classical Hollywood Cinema’s deliberately invisible grammar or the deconstruction and radicalism of a filmmaker like Godard, there is something inescapably real about watching bodies in motion in space, making us see things we didn’t see because they made us feel things we definitely felt.

Of course, while Godard and his peers were interested in dismantling and reinterpreting the generic trappings and structures of Hollywood’s early years (often with great love and admiration), not all of his countrymen have been so high-minded. Take, for example, Alexandre Aja, who sought (along with co-writer Grégory Levasseur) not to undermine or critique the formulae of the 1980s slasher, but rather to amplify them. Thus were we gifted with High Tension, a film in which the phrase “every cut is a lie” takes on entirely new, insulting meaning, a steaming cinematic turdpile and gracious reminder that the erudite and cultured French are just as capable of thuddingly insulting idiocy as any American.

(One cannot speak of High Tension’s special brand of stupidity without delving into specifics, so beware spoilers all ye who enter here, not just for High Tension, but also (at least arguably) for The Usual Suspects, Sabotage, Stage Fright, Fight Club, Goodnight Mommy, The Sixth Sense, Dressed to Kill, A Tale of Two Sisters, Rashomon, Psycho, and Fatal Attraction.)

The plot specifics of High Tension, such as they are, are familiar from any number of “mad killer” movies (as well as, apparently, the Dean Koontz novel Intensity, from which High Tension has been accused of stealing its first two-thirds). Marie (Cécile De France) and Alex (Maïwenn) are students looking for a quiet place to study for exams. This takes them, naturally, to the remote farmhouse of Alex’s family, near cornfields and woods and with nary a neighbor around to hear any possible blood-curdling screams. And who, naturally, should show up the night of Marie and Alex’s trip but an unnamed bloodthirsty maniac (Philippe Nahon) intent on slaughtering them all, the French countryside seemingly just as overrun with homicidal rednecks as the American heartland. Will Marie be able to save her friend from the clutches of this monster? Who will survive, and what will be left of them?

Very little, it turns out. Not content simply to make a run-of-the-mill (albeit exceedingly gory) slasher, Aja and Levasseur aim for cleverness, for a twist to make the audience gasp and to cast everything that preceded it in a new, disturbing light. But as a great musician once said, there’s such a thin line between “stupid” and “clever.” And if, from the vantage of High Tension’s end credits, one peers far into the distance, one can see that line on the horizon, straddled by M. Night Shyamalan mockingly raising a glass.

For you see, dear fellow movie lover, the murderous lunatic we have watched rampaging for upwards of an hour does not exist. No, our killer is not the disgusting, portly, middle-aged man dressed in grime-caked coveralls—our killer is Marie, who has a split personality. This revelation is, to put it mildly, infuriating. It is inarguably and inexcusably moronic on its face—an audience-insulting cheat of the lowest order. (In one of Roger Ebert’s most delightful putdowns, he notes that “the movie’s plot has a hole that is not only large enough to drive a truck through, but in fact does have a truck driven right through it.”) But it is so much more than that. A film that cheats to give its audience a jolt is commonplace, though few are as brazen about it as High Tension. That brazenness can make it easy to overlook High Tension’s other flaws—that its twist not only defies the laws of physics as we currently understand them, but also that it rests on the toxic equation of lesbianism and criminality (without any hint of complicating nuance), and that, on a fundamental level, it is a poorly written, heavy-handed, derivative mess. A shoddy ending can leave a sour aftertaste to an otherwise pleasant product, but the entirety of High Tension is soaked in vinegar.

First, though, the mechanics of the twist and a brief detour through film history by way of Hitchcock. (There is no cinematic topic that cannot be tied back to Hitchcock in some or another manner by the enterprising writer.) The Master of Suspense was no stranger to boundary-pushing or attendant controversy, whipping up fervent denunciations for manipulating the audience or transgressing narrative and social norms. Where his attempts worked and were generally popular (as in Psycho’s murder of its sole star a third of the way through), Hitchcock was happy to revel in his wily glory. But when his attempts received a more mixed response, Hitchcock, ever the canny showman, would apologize for moves that, in hindsight, appear to have been correct, or at least unobjectionable. (The most obvious of these is Sabotage’s brilliant bomb-on-the-bus sequence, which ends with a tragedy that is obviously necessary from an overall narrative and thematic standpoint, but for which the director apologized profusely at the time as a breach of decorum, and for which he continued to hedge his bets as a possible violation of his rules of suspense.)

One of Hitchcock’s more prominent controversies involves one of his lesser-known films, the enjoyable-but-slight Stage Fright, and its use of the “lying flashback.” Stage Fright opens with Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) seeking help from Eve Gill (Jane Wyman), who has a crush on her friend. Jonathan is the lover of famous actress Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich), and is on the run from the police, wanted for murdering Charlotte’s husband. Via flashback, Jonathan tells Eve that Charlotte is the murderer and that he arrived at the crime scene only after the deed was done. Eve agrees to hide her would-be lover and snoops for evidence to incriminate Charlotte, but in the end it turns out that Jonathan’s story, as demonstrated via flashback, was a lie—Jonathan was the killer after all.

That this stirred passions at the time seems curious, even quaint. The very same year, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon told at least three lying flashbacks in much the same way—visually depicting a character’s tale of who-what-when-where-why—and it went on to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Though Rashomon’s openly conflicting tales bring the dishonesty to the forefront, it is a difference of degree rather than of kind. And one of the most popular films of the 1990s, The Usual Suspects, is constructed entirely around lying flashbacks as told by Verbal Kint/Keyser Söze (Kevin Spacey). Perhaps it is that we are always aware that Kint is, at the very least, a criminal, so the revelation of his lies is less blindsiding. Or perhaps it is that being on the vanguard of a systematic disruption—breaking the rule that flashbacks must be true—puts one at an inherent disadvantage. Whatever the case, for years Hitchcock wondered aloud whether he had made a mistake, telling Truffaut that he “never should have done” it, while also musing that, if it’s fine for a movie character to lie, and it’s fine for a movie to demonstrate via flashback a story told by a movie character, “why is it that we can’t tell a lie through a flashback?”

Of course, we can, as The Usual Suspects, Rashomon, and others have shown. Characters can lie, but films cannot—Godard’s pronouncement that editing, the very essence of cinema, is a lie is really just an acknowledgement that the creation of a movie’s reality excludes infinite other realities, but it is not inherently dishonest except to those alternate dimensions in which those differently edited films exist. Annie Hall is not fallacious simply because it left the editing bay as the reassembled corpse of aborted murder mystery Anhedonia. Put differently, as Thelma Schoonmaker has noted, Scorsese’s pictures may be violent, but they aren’t violent until she has edited them. Just as the fantastical and bizarre and ludicrous may be accepted onscreen so long as they are true to the universe established by the film, so may a film contain many lying characters and much carefully withheld information so long as the film is not by its very construction a lie.

Therein rests the problem with High Tension’s shocking revelation. The film is not presented, either formally or narratively, as occurring from Marie’s point of view. There is no Lady in the Lake-style first-person limitation, no “sit back and listen to my sad tale” bookends. Just a straightforward tale of carnage, unimaginative and off-puttingly sound-designed and weighed down by its early 2000s “smooth like plastic” sheen. When the film executes its pivot, everything—literally, everything—that went before it falls apart as impossible and inexplicable. Bizarrely, this cannot have escaped Aja and Levasseur—early drafts of their exercise in unoriginality, in addition to cribbing from Intensity and countless horror films past, also stole directly from Christopher McQuarrie’s Oscar-winning The Usual Suspects script, explicitly presenting the main narrative as the recollection of a hospital-bound Marie, only to have a doctor or policeman reveal in the closing scene that Marie had been lying. Yet some combination of Luc Besson’s suggestion and producer interference led to the change, turning an already mediocre and uninspired exercise in grotesquerie into a loogie spat directly into the viewer’s face.

One can see remnants of this original structure in one of High Tension’s more jarring moments. The film opens with Marie, badly injured and bandaged, in a hospital gown muttering “I won’t let anyone come between us anymore,” intercut with a bloodied Marie being chased through the woods before reaching a road and hailing a car for assistance. During this prologue, someone asks if something is recording—a stray line that, in the finished film, seems a complete non sequitur, but would make sense as part of the story-as-illustrated-interrogation first contemplated. Instead, Marie’s desperate attempts to flee the woods for safety are revealed to have been...wait for it...only a dream!

Thousands of words could be spilled on the impossibilities created by High Tension’s structure. Some are obvious—how, for example, could Marie be driving the killer’s grungy old truck and her stolen yellow sports car simultaneously? And some, were one being charitable, one could try to brush off—why, for example, do we get a shot ostensibly from Marie’s point-of-view in the closet while Alex’s mother (Oana Pellea) is murdered if in fact no one was in that closet? But unlike like The Sixth Sense, with its carefully chosen edits (lies!), or A Tale of Two Sisters, with its diligence as to who occupies the frame when, High Tension fails because it lazily, flagrantly lies to its audience. Films like Fight Club and Goodnight Mommy may be the visual equivalents of term papers that cite Wikipedia and hope to get away with it; High Tension is the student who, in lieu of a paper, hands in a flaming sack of dogshit and expects the teacher not to notice.

For example, if Marie is in the back of the truck comforting the bound-and-gagged Alex, she cannot also be driving the truck. Yet the truck seems to be moving—Alex eventually makes it to the middle of the woods. But if the truck is moving, then Marie cannot be in the back comforting Alex. Yet Alex responds to Marie, and not in the warm, loving way Marie would have been inclined to dream up, but with fear and trembling in one of the film’s clumsy bits of foreshadowing—meaning we are to read Alex’s reactions as real, not imagined. Similarly, Marie cannot have been in the bedroom comforting Alex while her brother, Tom (Marco Claudiu Pascu), is shot in the cornfield and also out in the cornfield shooting Tom. Yet we see Alex react to Marie in confused repulsion meant to signpost future revelations, even though Marie cannot have been where Alex reacted to her when Alex reacted to her. Likewise, at the gas station, Jimmy the attendant (Franck Khalfoun) looks not once but twice in the direction where Marie has gone hiding while he interacts with the killer—but we know that Jimmy is only having a single interaction with a single person, so his meaningful glances in the precise direction of Marie’s hiding places are pointless feints. That they are meant to give the killer a motive for axing Jimmy in order to set up an extended game of cat-and-mouse between the killer and Marie—who are, by the way, the same person—only makes their mercenary dishonesty even harder to stomach.

This points to one of High Tension’s other problems, one often overlooked in favor of the galling absurdity of its gotcha revelation: High Tension is, internal incoherence aside, a thoroughly lousy movie. While Aja wastes little time in getting things going, he kills off most of his victims with half the movie remaining, leading to long, pointless, tension-free (see what I did there?) scenes like Marie skulking in the gas station lavatory hoping to avoid the killer and a “car chase” between the killer’s truck and Marie’s car that is so languidly paced, it suggests what Nuri Bilge Ceylan might produce should he move into torture porn. Our killer, as he searches the farmhouse to root out any targets outside of Alex’s immediate family, is tremendously thorough, touching the guest room radiator to see if it’s warm and sticking his finger inside the bathroom sink’s faucet to see if it’s recently been used—but is somehow so sloppy that he misses Marie hiding under the bed even though he picks up the mattress to look under the bed, which is rather like Mary Poppins checking the Banks’ mantle for dust with her white-gloved hand only to stop just short of a visible mound of soot. In classic “don’t go into the basement” fashion, Marie calls 9-1-1 from the gas station to request police assistance only to scream maniacally at the dispatcher and hang up when asked for her location, a bout of stupidity that destroys the remaining goodwill any particularly generous viewers may have been holding onto.

Perhaps most gallingly, the opening footage of Marie “dreaming” that she was chased through the woods ends up being identical to the climactic footage of Marie chasing Alex through the woods, complete with the same motorist in the same car stopping for Marie and for Alex—which could make sense if Marie is recounting a false story in which she manipulates selective details, but makes no sense as presented here, where it is... some sort of premonition of things yet to pass? An accident? The script supervisor’s day off? And of course, let us not forget that Marie explains that the guy chasing her in her dream wasn’t a guy at all, but was her (“It was me running after me.”), a bit of foreshadowing so ham-handed it nearly somersaults its way back to brilliance before collapsing in a heap of images of Marie reflected in mirrors and windows and wearing a sandwich board reading “IT’S ME! IT’S ME!”

And what to make of the meaning behind “me running after me” and the film’s ultimate thesis that Marie’s lesbianism leads her to become a mentally ill monster? One could try to come up with some excuses for High Tension—perhaps it is trying out a clever new spin on the Final Girl, taking the next logical step from Final Girl and killer as opposite sides of a coin to being one and the same, or perhaps it is suggesting that Marie’s repression or rejection leads her to snap rather than her lesbianism per se. But this is hard to reconcile with the film’s content. Fatal Attraction, whatever its plentiful faults, makes clear that Alex Forrest’s (Glenn Close) homicidal tendencies are a result of being spurned—there is no suggestion that they have anything to do with her heterosexuality. Similarly, though undeniably impolitic and inclined to have its cake and eat it too, Dressed to Kill manages to at least paper over its less enlightened implications by nodding to the notion that 1980s-era social repression could be the determinative factor in Dr. Elliott’s (Michael Caine) behavior, rather than Dr. Elliott’s transsexuality itself. Yet despite France’s reputation as a libertine hotbed where anything goes, High Tension is rather explicit that Marie’s rampage is driven by her sexual orientation—a toxic assertion that is easy to miss amid the violence done to the space-time continuum.

The idea of Marie as jilted lover fails as a plausible explanation for the simple reason that Alex and Marie were never lovers. On the contrary, Aja and Levasseur go to great lengths in their early exposition dump to let us know that Alex is a party girl who is happy to go home with a variety of guys while remaining oblivious to Marie’s obvious crush on Alex. While Alex may be a moron, nothing in High Tension lays the groundwork to read her negligence toward Marie’s longing as deliberate or knowing or cruel, depriving the film of at least one excuse for Marie’s behavior. (The most charitable reading, I suppose, would be that Marie feels spurned by Alex, but the fact that she never acts even slightly on her feelings for Alex makes this untenable.) Similarly, the film makes no attempt to suggest that Marie’s sublimation of her desire causes her to snap—on the contrary, it is the desire itself that drives her criminal conduct. As her gross, overweight, middle-aged male counterpart, the killer queries, “What do you want from Alex? She turns you on? She turns me on, too.” Later, once the identity scam is exposed, Marie tells Alex, “You’d drive a woman crazy. You little slut,” and mutters to herself that “Nobody will come between us, ever, ever again.” One could squint and read these as jealousy for Alex’s dalliances with men and refusal to go to bed with Marie, but Occam’s razor says that the straightforward “lesbianism kills” reading is the correct one.

This reading is reinforced by the fact that the killer’s arrival at the farmhouse coincides with Marie masturbating to fondly recalled images of Alex showering—and by the fact that Marie cannot hear the truck’s arrival or the initial doorbell ring because she is lost in her orgasmic same-sex fantasy. Nor does shock or internalized homophobia at a sudden recognition of her homosexuality explain Marie’s behavior—the constant chatter about how Marie is cold and rude when guys try to talk to her and refuses to date, Marie’s obvious irritation at Alex’s male romantic relationships, and Marie’s comfort with spying on a showering Alex all suggest that, whatever Alex’s ignorance, Marie is well aware of her orientation. Here again, Aja and Levasseur are generous enough to make sure close readings are not the refuge of the skeptical, moving beyond suggestion by having the killer introduced while fellating himself with a severed woman’s head—Alex’s head, in fact, which we see when he cavalierly drops it from his truck window. Given what we learn of the killer’s identity, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Marie knows she is a lesbian and that her lesbianism is the font from which her mass murder springs.

So, what does that leave us with? A film in which a third-person-omniscient perspective is utilized to show us nothing but falsehoods, stitched together from the spare parts of superior films of yesteryear, and with a thesis statement of “the gays are coming to kill you.” A film in which two women caterwauling to Europop is the height of characterization. A film in which industrial and electronic whirs and screeches try in vain to summon atmosphere, instead summoning the nearest bottle of ibuprofen. A film in which a white blonde woman’s slaughter of a darker-skinned, vaguely ethnic family manages not to crack the top five of its offenses. A film in which a young child’s murder is discreetly committed offscreen, only to have the director suddenly linger over the child’s corpse—and worse, seemingly more out of callousness-induced boredom than a desire to shock or to toy puckishly with his audience. Godard, reviewing Strangers on a Train in Cahiers du Cinéma, wrote that, “The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.” With neither morals nor ideas, High Tension cannot manage the terror it hopes to achieve. Instead, it’s death by a thousand lies.