Like "Skin of Man, Heart of Beast", this impressive French debut demolishes the myth of the Gallic countryside as a bucolic idyll, instead conjuring up a world dictated by brutal violence and elemental forces.
Switching between listlessness and recklessness, Damien Odoul's fever-dream of a film follows a day in the life of 15-year-old David (Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc), a boy from the city staying with his uncles on their sheep farm in the sun-blasted Limousin region.
It's the barbecue for the men of the village, and the teenager has been invited to join in with the drinking, feasting, and singing of les hommes: it's to be his initiation into adult camaraderie. Fretting over his absent father, the blind-drunk youngster later heads off into the fields in search of both his pal Matthieu (Laurent Simon) and his privileged, cello-playing girlfriend Aurore (Laure Magadoux).
Odoul doesn't attempt to rationalise the behaviour of his volatile, troubled, and lustful protagonist: instead the filmmaker immerses the viewer in his vivid dreams and animalistic fantasies, showing the universe from his frenzied perspective.
Indeed "Le Souffle" is studded with images of sacrifice, both human and animal, whilst the tale has echoes of a fairy-tale quest to rescue a castle-bound princess.
Strikingly shot in black and white, and powerfully acted by an entirely non-professional cast, "Le Souffle" borrows, in its crisp running time (less than 80 minutes), from some of the major figures of French cinema: one detects traces of Georges Franju's dark poeticism; of Truffaut's "The 400 Blows"; and there's a considerable debt to Robert Bresson's rural dramas "Mouchette" and "Au hasard Balthazar", in the way animals witness and endure man's cruelty.
Still, Odoul's visceral vision of raw masculinity suggests a directorial talent of considerable promise.
In French with English subtitles.
Le Souffle (2003)
