Cast: Vincent Cassel, Olivier Barthelemy, Justine Lerooy, Vanessa Decat, Boris Gamthety
Characters: Patrick, Remy
Rémy seems like a typical teenage boy: he is a muscular youth, a sportsman, and he spends too long on his computer. But he is also a redhead; and in High School, red hair is enough to have you banished to the oyster boats.
Stylised – chintzy, red house, celebrating the loud ugliness of welfare housing.
Humour – flashes of it; especially the laconic Cassel
Sudden bursts of intense classical music
Almost absurd – young man goes to cemetery to meet a Gothic girl he met on WoW, only to discover that it is really a troubled teenage boy with a Marilyn Manson hang-up.
What is it with Gavras and redheads?!?
Cassel is half-crazed from the outset – starting fights with Arab gangsters and feeling up elderly women.
Seducing young girls – flicking their noses and patting their heads. He is a harlequin, a Lothario, and a nutjob.
Surreal moment in an closed hypermarket when Rémy discovers a giant sign for some weird cultish ‘redhead’ land of dreams… it is a publicity stand for Ireland Tourist Board!
It all flips when they try to buy a nice car – Patrick accuses the salesman of only stocking French cars (round and lacking style) and Porsche’s that Jews drove in the 1980s. The Jewish salesman takes offense and calls him a “carrot-top”… and the rest is history.
They go on a crazed murder run – seeking retribution for the enslavement and abuse of their people (redheads). They chant that they are a people with “no country, and no army”.
“I will make them more refined… and then you will love me for what I am”
Gavras’ work always seems to have a surreal, dark humour – it is violent and cruel but tinged with a strange jolly warmth… even when genocide is committed against all redheads to the sounds of MIA.
Remy can’t shit without taking all his clothes off.
Patrick attacks him… why is he running away? Does he want to be an immigrant? Does he need to be somewhere where he can be just like everybody else? Or should he stay in ignominy as a Messiah? Should he stay and fight. Either way… the logical next step is to buy a dapper new suit and cravat and compliment it with a shotgun and a lethal crossbow.
There is a decadent hotel orgy with buxom young women being set alight by a sullen Patrick… incapable of rousing his spirits even to fuck, and taking his exasperation out on a sexually confused and increasingly volatile Remy, who attempts to rape the concierge just to check if he really is gay… to the concierge’ relief… he discovers he isn’t!)
- Patrick also pisses in a Jacuzzi before masturbating before the terrified couple too scared to move in case Remy release an arrow in their direction.
They raid the hotel kitchens naked, all under the watchful eye of a sadistic, silent young redheaded girl straight out of a Kubrick fantasy.
This almost becomes a fable – where our anti-heroes nearly make it but are destroyed by their own vices at the final hurdle.
They are the most fucked up, weird, misguided rebel couple in the history of the cinema.
A horrific bloody finale – but still somehow colourful, and strangely jolly and warm.
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