A young woman, mourning the death of her lover, drives her striking red vintage sports car through the French countryside. With the urn holding Frida’s ashes strapped into the passenger seat, Anya (Aurélia Mengin) travels alone whilst lost in grief. Disconsolate and disconnected from the world, memories blend with freakish fantasies as she recalls her life with her partner. When night falls, Anya calls at a strange, downbeat dive Le Fornacis. There she becomes enthralled with Wolf (Emmanuel Bonami), a brooding and taciturn club-goer, who drives them both off into the night.
Summarising the opening sequence of Fornacis risks giving the impression that the film is a lot more straightforward than it is. The film does have a linear narrative of sorts, but ‘story’ takes a distant second place to a concern with abstract visuals, unsettling soundscapes and layers of metaphor and abstraction. Aside from brief poetic statements, delivered as narration, there is next to no dialogue in the film.
As should now be obvious, Fornacis is a product of the defiantly non-naturalistic end of the spectrum of modern French arthouse cinema. As Anya’s experiences unfold, writer-director-star Aurélia Mengin and cinematographer Nicolas Bordier conjure up suitably strange and surreal images on screen. Their efforts are reinforced by bold and emblematic art direction by Mengin.
The depiction of Anya’s dilemma blends elements of body-horror with the signatures of sapphic and vampiric cinema. The intention is to produce a film that is hypnotic: a lush, immersive on-screen experience in which reality and fantasy blur without boundaries. Everything is delivered with a great deal of confidence and more than a little élan. It is, though, hard to assess the characterisation of the small, and clearly very committed, cast because they’re not being asked to deliver anything close to a natural performance. And while the film’s visuals can claim to be striking and experimental, its sound textures feel more familiar and hit many predictable beats.
By the time the end credits roll, it may not be entirely clear to everyone watching exactly what this movie is trying to say about the existential experience of grief and longing. But this is cinema at its most art-flick niche, and those who don’t warm to Fornacis’ charms are unlikely to have lasted the distance to the film’s finale to reflect on that question.
Where to watch: the Cine-Excess streaming channel.
