Foreign Spotlight: The Ordeal

Debuted in 2004 and winner of the Grand Jury Prize of European Fantasy Film in Silver at the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival, Calvaire (The Ordeal) is the latest French language horror film to arrive on the American screen. The first feature-length work from Belgium-born writer/director Fabrice Du Wlez, Calvaire is the story of Marc Stevens, a traveling singer and performer on the road working the retirement home circuit a few days before Christmas. When his van breaks down en route to his next gig he finds himself stranded in the middle of the countryside and forced to take shelter in the ramshackle Bartel Inn. While the innkeeper, Mr. Bartel (Jackie Berroyer), seems hospitable and friendly at first (he feels a connection to Marc, because Bartel is a former comedian), it is not long before Marc is no longer Bartel’s guest, but his prisoner.

Jackie Berroyer gives an oddball gem of a performance as Bartel, a man pushed to the extremes of human behavior not by depravity and evil, but by love and desperation and pain. He has lost the passion for life, and when it is reawakened by the arrival of Marc, he will do anything to keep it (remember the old saying “You always hurt the one you love”?). As Marc, Laurent Lucas stays true to the character even after the film and everything in it starts treating him like a piece of meat. On stage, dancing in a purple cloak, Marc Stevens projects a kind of androgynous rock-star sexuality, but off stage this sexuality washes off as quickly as his make-up. And once his ordeal has begun, the physical pain he endures does not distract from the mental and emotional humiliation of what is happening to him.

The English language title of the film is The Ordeal, however the literal translation of Calvaire refers to the trip that someone being crucified must take when carrying their cross to the place where they are to be nailed to it. Both titles are fitting for the film, but “ordeal” (though an appropriate word for what poor Marc Stevens goes through), lacks the religious connotations of “calvaire,” and the film is rife with religious imagery. It is also rife with references to other horror films, most notably Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Deliverance. Also present are alumni from other French-language horror films. It is photographed by Benoit Debie, who photographed Gapser Noe’s Irreversible, and Philippe Nahon (the butcher from Noe’s I Stand Alone and the brutal madman at the center of Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension), plays the ringleader among the inbred villagers who want Marc for their own.

But for all it borrows, Calvaire is a strikingly original film in it’s own right. Lacking the KNB special effects team behind nearly every U.S. horror film (I’m not criticizing, I think KNB is the best things to happen to horror since the invention of the zombie movie), Calvaire relies on old-fashioned tension, dread, and sheer bizarreness (this film contains quite possibly the greatest dance number captured on film, ever) to churn the audience’s stomach. Throughout most of the film, Du Welz keeps the nastiness—whether it be an act of bestiality, some very unwanted cuddling, or car-battery to the skull—out of frame. Think the famous ear scene in Reservoir Dogs. He does not focus the attention on the gore like so many other directors do; the violence is at times sudden, blunt, and unforgiving, and at other times, loud, disorienting, and surreal, almost like an out-of-body experience. Sound is used to brilliant result. Death is cold-blooded, unremarkable, and intimate. The effect is nightmarish and unsettling.

Palm Pictures released The Ordeal on August 11th in New York and Los Angeles with a wider release to occur in the weeks to come.