Paris, 1979. Anne (played by Gallic-pop icon and actress Vanessa Paradis), following a tumultuous breakup with her former lover and current editor Loïs (Kate Moran), is in the midst of personal and professional crises. She is a producer and director of gentlemen cinema, and though work keeps her and the loose collective of men who serve as her repertory company busy, it never eliminates the doubt and unease that keeps her in a reckless personal place. Anne is the closest thing to a traditional movie lead in Yann Gonzalez’s new film Knife+Heart (which will show this weekend as one of the Belcourt’s two Midnight Movies, alongside 1980’s Cruising). She’s bound by the characteristics mainstream audiences associate with tough-living men who are trapped on the outside of a mystery — in this case, the brutal murder of one of her porn performers.
That’s an interesting place to be, and writer-director Gonzalez delights in making movies, videos and concepts about and in interesting places. If you’ve not seen Gonzalez’s first feature, You and the Night, remedy that. It’s certainly a great preparation for the heightened emotional space in which Knife+Heart unfolds, and its common elements (the score by Gonzalez’s brother Anthony’s m83 project, a perfect performance from icon-in-the-making Nicolas Maury) will give the reticent viewer a means to acclimate. Knife+Heart is essential viewing — sumptuous, a tad silly, shocking and built on the most unexpectedly solid emotional foundations. The Gonzalez brothers are masters of swoon, bringing across big emotions, and working together, they are unstoppable.
Much like Bi Gan’s forthcoming hallucinatory 3D masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Knife+Heart ultimately attempts to unmake the chaos and horror at its root through the judicious application of love and intelligence, delivering genre excess and arthouse arch in heaps.
In this film, being a porn performer is like being a model in a giallo or a cop about to retire in a police drama — it is a death sentence meant to motivate the next act in the script. While Knife+Heart is serious in its treatment of the horror elements it depicts, it has a ribald playfulness that understands that all of it — the joyful fleshy abundance as well as the stylized sequences of ghoulish bloodletting — is playing dress-up. There are echoes of the playful Frankie Goes to Hollywood pageantry of Brian DePalma’s Body Double, but without any of that film’s occasional misogyny. As Anne throws herself into the dual roles of director and detective, she begins to incorporate real-life elements of the mystery around her and turns it into porn. Frustrated desire is the engine that drives this sleek thrill machine, and Gonzalez and his cast know exactly how much skin to show and how much heart to brandish.
Like the lost classic Urbania, Knife+Heart depicts what gay heaven looks like, so it’s not interested in heteronormative equivalency. At all. It is a sensual thesis statement that allows equal footing for desire and reconciliation in a sense that moves beyond the concept of the individual — as if Maxfield Parrish or Pierre et Gilles took a crack at the legendary unfilmed ending of Heathers. At times, this film has the unbridled passion and dizzying romanticism of a Kate Bush album, but it’s also determined to solve the mystery of who keeps killing all these porn stars. And the end result is something unexpected. This is a film with its Boogie Nights heart on its sleeve, perfectly suited for the reassurances of 35-millimeter grain (Knife+Heart was shot on and is being shown at the Belcourt on 35mm film.) HD is sharp, like memory, its serrated edges a series of wounds, whereas the soft textures of film, both in origin and in exhibition, are like dreams — more inviting and luxurious.
The dizzying high point of the film is set at a mixed-lesbian bar — the queer agora, where everyone gets their own Verdian moment to come to terms with where the murders, betrayals and fucks for business and for pleasure have led them. Pico’s 1979 tripped-out Frisco disco cover of the flamenco classic “Malaguena” plays. It’s simply magical. And that’s Knife+Heart: gruesome, ribald, unconcerned with your comfort around fuzzy butts or baroquely stylized violence, and utterly transporting in its new worlds of sound, vision, and sensual overload.
