Maelstrom

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Horrorphile - January 2009

Maelström

January 12th 2009 23:38

25-year-old Bibiane Champagne (Marie-Josée Croze) has inherited her mother’s established fashion empire which she co-manages with older brother Phillipe (Bobby Beshro). Bibiane is also a model, but she seems disassociated, even dissatisfied with the stitched up world of material beauty. Then she discovers she is pregnant and a spanner is deep in the works.

She decides on abortion, which causes her great emotional instability. Her role at work is compromised and shortly after a blasé magazine interview she is informed by her brother that due to her incompetence with a big client she’s been fired. Her friend Claire (Stephanie Morgenstern) offers solace.

Marie-Josee Croze as Bibiane

Bibiane drowns her sorrows at a club, but whilst driving home inebriated she blindsides a man who has darting recklessly across the street. He is seriously injured, but Bibiane panics and flees the scene. The mortally-wounded man manages to stumble to his nearby home where he expires at his kitchen table. Meanwhile Bibiane awakes the next morning with a brutal hangover and the terrible truth sinking slowly in.

Jean-Nicholas Verreault as Evian

Denis Villeneueve’s brilliantly dark adult fairy tale, Maelström (2000), a French-Canadian production set in Quebec and (briefly) Norway, is one of the stranger romances you’re ever likely to see. Partially narrated by several large talking fish (yes, that’s right, fish, voiced by Pierre Lebeau), who are about to be butchered by an infernal fishmonger, the story of Bibiane’s plight as she struggles with the moral implications of the accident and her own role in the bigger picture is told with the clarity and ambiguity of a deep lucid dream.

Bibiane is rejected by her brother

Water, or more precisely, the ocean and its creatures, are the movie’s re-occuring visual motifs; frothy, churning sea and dark rippling water; hard like concrete, powerful like a whirlpool, but also the soft warm cascade of a shower. The cinematography by Andre Turpin is absolutely stunning, at times dark and vivid like colour reversal slide film, and at others the palette is bleached out, cold and icy. Director Villeneuve made numerous video clips, and his attention to composition and editing is inspiring, melding aesthetics superbly.

Bibiane feels sullied by everything

More than half way through the movie Bibiane meets Evian (get it?) Karlson (Jean-Nicholas Verreault), the Norwegian deep-sea diver son of the dead fishmonger. Fate has brought them together in unusual circumstances and progresses in somewhat macabre fashion as Bibiane lies about her connection with Evian’s deceased father Head-Annstein Karlson (Klimbo). Evian and Bibiane become romantically entangled.

Maelstrom Marie-Josee Croze and Marc Gelinas

Bibiane is compelled to confess to a stranger

Maelström is one very moody love story, but told with consummate skill, and one that transcends its arguably pretentious existentialist trappings of ennui to deliver a surprisingly tender and beautiful fable of self-indulgence, guilt, selflessness and acceptance. It is the jagged nightmare that transmogrifies into a slippery dream. Curiosity stroked the cat, as the surf came crashing in.

Maelstrom Jean-Nicholas Verreault and Marie-Josee Croze

Bibiane is drawn toward Evian like a fish into a whirlpool ...

Villeneuve plays with the power of the imagery constantly; juxtaposing the grotesque with the erotic. It is a sublimely sensual film full of texture and subtley, and a shifting tone with toys with black humour, even bizarre slapstick (the hideous infernal fish scenes). The acting is wonderful; Croze, although a troubled young woman, somewhat self-absorbed and hedonistic, she still manages to illicit empathy, while Verreault provides the warm edge. Their chemistry feels genuine.

Maelstrom Marie-Josee Croze and Jean-Nicholas Verreault

... So it's back under the shower for more sensual cleansing

Maelström features a favourite Tom Waits piece which rears its head from time to time (“The ocean doesn’t want me today …”), so it gets another tick. But it’s the movie’s sexy nonchalance and phantasmogorical eccentricity that resonates most strongly. The movie’s philosophical idiosyncrasies form a delicate pattern, the sardonic humour rebounding off the dramatic irony. The entire mood and visual richness reminds me of Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy, with its vaguely supernatural and elusive atmosphere of desire dancing with fate; of sex and death beneath the ocean upon the land of love.

In case you’re wondering, “maelstrom” means a restless confusion of affairs or influence and is taken from Maelström, a famous violent whirlpool off the coast of Norway.

Much to my dismay, I could not find a trailer or any clips whatsoever for the movie.

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Posted By: Bryn - Category: movie reviews

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Comments

2 Comments. [ Add A Comment ]

Comment by Norm

January 17th 2009 23:35

Consumption Malfunction
Equal and Opposite
Arses and Elbows
Footy Power

A better review than the actual film, I'm guessing

Comment by Bryn

January 18th 2009 22:08

Horrorphile

Norm, oh? And what pray tell gave you that idea? I was darkly colorful in my review, but the nature of the film dictated that. I love this movie.

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