CALVAIRE

Marc Stevens is a singer returning from a performance at a retirement home; during the trip, his van breaks down in the middle of the forest, so Marc decides to seek shelter in a nearby inn. Mr. Bartel, the innkeeper, immediately appears very kind and helpful, but behind his calm and melancholic appearance hides a psychopath: Bartel, in fact, will kidnap Marc mistaking him for the woman he loved in the past and who abandoned him, and will subject him to every kind of torture. Released in Italy directly for the home video market, "Calvaire" is one of those small debut works destined not to go unnoticed. The young Belgian Fabrice Du Welz gathers many clichés of postmodern horror cinema, especially of European and American nationality, and puts together a story halfway between the most manifest madness and the disturbing, thus creating a film that has its own personality and originality despite the obvious references to classics of the genre. One of the greatest merits of "Calvaire" is the enhancement of natural scenery, consisting of the desolate wooded landscapes of a Belgium wrapped in snow and sadness, capable of reflecting the emotions and sensations of mad estrangement in which the characters of the story find themselves living. If, on the one hand, it is exemplary to want to give life to characters completely out of the ordinary, on the other hand, this extreme surrealism in the character construction of the protagonists clashes in an evident way with the realism of the staging: the mad Bartel (played by an excellent Jackie Berroyer) is the reflection of the inner upheaval of a man who has lost everything in his life and finds himself managing an inn lost in the middle of nowhere, where no one has set foot for years, a modern Norman Bates who recognizes the beloved and lost woman even in a traveler, thus showing that the perception he has of the world and things is now completely sunk in a private universe and tending to schizophrenia. On the other hand, we have Marc Stevens (played by Laurent Lucas), an artist who is presented to us from the very first shot as an ambiguous and asexual being, in a prophetic performance that presents his feminine side; if the madness and estrangement of which Marc is a victim certainly has a great impact on the viewer's emotions, his excessive submissiveness to events seems too little credible: a big and strong man who lets an old man do everything to him, without ever reacting, but limiting himself to whining, is not exactly the height of plausibility and is the factor that clashes the most with the climate of tension and scenographic realism described. Another element of extreme interest in "Calvaire" is represented by the presence of a group of hicks led by Philippe Nahon (the killer of "High Tension") who live in the village near the forest; a group of loggers and farmers, all men, with unsettling behaviors (the hallucinating improvised dance in the bar to dark rhythm is chilling!) and deviant habits, dedicated to rape and carnal relations with animals. Here the source of inspiration is clearly "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," but the film to which Du Welz pays homage for the hallucinating finale is surely the omnipresent "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" by Hooper, even resuming the famous dinner scene. Excellent is the directorial performance of Du Welz, capable of giving life to slow and reflective sequences in the first part of the film, to then plunge in the second part into a whirlwind of madness and nightmare using original plan-sequences, a psychedelic photography and sound effects to make your hair stand on end (the painful grunt of the pig that accompanies the entire part of the rape and the escape really makes your skin crawl!). A slight criticism can be directed at the screenplay by Du Welz himself, which sometimes presents some gaps that do not perfectly align with the compactness of the story, but it is a trifle, because overall "Calvaire" is definitely a good film. Recommended!