Philippe Grandrieux's film LA VIE NOUVELLE shadows the waning light of human civilization with its punitive master animal, mankind. The film conveys itself through strident photography. There is little to no dialogue at all. And an atmospherically industrial soundtrack intensifies the arresting images it accompanies, adding tension to pictures already wrought with anxiety and rage. Numerous shots pull in and out of focus, careen around unsteadily, explore dark color temperatures and aperture levels, and at one point the photography flips into negativism, symbolically suggestive of hell. The story, somewhat inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, follows a woman sold into prostitution and the young man who battles his own animalism while trying to save her. Ironically, he wagers his own civilized self for her rescue. Grandrieux's dark film saturates the audience with a deluge of violent sexual imagery as well as straight male aggression, cinematographic escorts in his presentation of unchecked human nihilism. With content so carnal and desolate, the film flirts with the audience's own voyeurism and sense of a primal nature, seeking to alert the mind to the vile body in which it's housed. At times shocking and lurid, the film relays an extreme vision of human nature as ultimately bestial.

release year: 2003

star(s): Anna Mouglalis