Hunting for Rabbits
To call Francois Ozon's Criminal Lovers (Les Amants Criminels) disturbing would be an understatement. As
would calling it challenging, visceral, horrific,
even, at times, funny. But one thing Criminal Lovers
is not, is romantic. Instead, its probing of troubled
adolescent sexuality challenges quaint notions of
romantic love and death, reframing them on the level
of Greek tragedy or noir thriller. Here, Thanatos
and Eros struggle for mastery, much like they did in
de Sade and von Sacher-Masoch's violent, fantastical
sex games. However, Ozon exploits their
sadomasochistic models and psychotic codependency
without resorting to either campy S&M fetishism (whips
and leather? C'mon) or the excessive stupidity of Mr.
Obvious' Natural Born Killers. Bonds are formed and
broken through passive-aggressive power relations —
master and servant roles — beginning with the twisted
union of cold, seductive Alice (Natacha Regnier) and
weak-willed Luc (Jeremie Renier), two suburban teens
whose boredom and confusion lead them down a dark path
to murder, cannibalism, rape, and terror.
The two high schoolers plan and commit a vicious
murder, but when they attempt to get away with it,
they encounter something more horrible than even their
morbid imaginations could conjure up. Alice sets the
wheels spinning, roping her timid and sexually
impotent boyfriend, Luc into her plot to kill a
classmate, the suave, swaggering boxer Said, who asks
Alice point blank whether she wants to fuck him or
not. She seems flattered, not disgusted, with this
approach, but plans Said's death immediately
afterwards. She tells Luc that Said and his gang
raped, convincing him that Said deserves to be killed;
and so, after watching Alice make out with Said in the
shower, Luc brutally stabs the boxer to death while
she looks on, apparently giddy with delight. After the
murder, the couple staggers about, gasping in bloody
horror and ecstasy.
In classic Hitchcockian form, Ozon subverts our
expectations. (In an interview in the film's press
kit, Ozon quotes Hitchcock: "A murder must be filmed
like a love scene and a love scene like a murder.")
Aesthetically, the murder is the sexiest scene in the
movie, but in a way that recalls not Hitchcock so much
as Fassbinder (particularly Ali: Fear Eats the Soul). Nothing is hidden from view. The death takes
place in a space framed by the shower entrance through
which the viewer watches the murder, as Luke had
watched the shower seduction from the other room.
Therefore, the horror and fascination of watching such
an event is magnified by the feeling that one is
standing in the next room. Like Fassbinder, Ozon uses
this hidden, voyeuristic gaze, to provide the
sensation of terrible, petrified, yet thrilling
immediacy felt in slasher films. Later on, the murder
scene is repeated in slow motion and in silence,
reinforcing the brutal dynamism of the act and, as
Ozon says in the same interview, to make you "feel
again the pleasure of killing that Alice experienced."
That pleasure quickly turns to anarchy and terror
after the conspirators drive out to the woods to
dispose of the body. Romantic conceptions of tranquil
nature, and fairy tale images of a wild and
supernatural forest, both shape Alice and Luc's
journey into the woods. Before Said's funeral, the
couple heads to the store to purchase a shovel,
wandering around the supermarket like lost toddlers.
In the press release, Ozon calls Hansel and Gretel
his favorite fairy tale: it is inevitable that Alice
and Luc will meet some kind of man-eating monster in
the forest. They do so in the form of a gaunt,
stone-faced woodsman (chillingly played by
accomplished Serbian actor Miki Manojlovic). His
cabin, with its promises food and shelter, attracts
the hungry killers after their grueling work at
gravedigging. When the woodsman returns from rabbit
hunting, he discovers them and ultimately traps then
in a dank, rat-infested cellar, where he has deposited
Said's corpse. There, he starves Alice and fattens Luc
with freshly killed rabbit... and human flesh. Alice
observes while the woodsman makes Luc his pet, placing
him on a leash and sodomizing him (tenderly, which
makes it all the more difficult to watch). Like
Alice's previous domination of Luc, the woodsman's use
of sexuality incorporates both pleasure and pain. But
where Alice taunted and humiliated Luc into
submission, the woodsman uses intimidation to control
Luc, threatening him, in part by skinning a rabbit in
front of him.
Like Hansel and Gretel, the poor little children
escape: by this time, compared to the woodsman, they
do seem precious and fragile. But there's something
else too: again on the run, Alice and Luc steal a
moment in a serene sunlit gully and make hot,
passionate love, surrounded by the friendly, watchful
animals of an almost Disneyan forest. Their
transformation from angsty teen killers to innocent
wood nymphs is sweet, weird, and funny. But they are
still murderers and fugitives, and the ultimate
power-player — the Law — is on the prowl.
The movie makes it difficult to judge Alice and Luc,
despite the horrific nature of their crime. They are
not lovable kids. They are not even likable. But they
are small and cute and alive, and like the woodsman's
rabbits, subject to the whims and appetites of the
larger and more powerful. While philosophers, clergy,
pundits, and various "experts" struggle to define and
contain the problem of youth violence, the question of
a "natural" or somehow "naive" violence — the
instinct to control, possess, and devour at any age —
is often overlooked. By revisiting the mist-shrouded,
unpredictable, and morally nebulous world of the fairy
tale, Francois Ozon touches the soft places deep down
where childhood fears of dark, untamed nature dwell,
buried under middle class rhetoric and suburban
asphalt.
