CRIMINAL LOVERS (LES AMANTS CRIMINELS)
directed by Francois Ozon
(Strand, 90 minutes, France)
Once Francois Ozon's daringly explicit films See The Sea, Sitcom and Water Drops on Burning Rocks hit the European mainland, he was immediately dubbed "the bad boy of French cinema". After suffering through the over-the-top, downright disturbing Criminal Lovers, I am convinced that Ozon is trying too hard to live up to his new title.
Criminal Lovers is the type of film that would never be made in post-Columbine America; it's a Natural Born Killers in which the killers are under 18. Alice (Natacha Regnier), the femme fatale, is a promiscuous, manipulative bitch whose actions are merciless. As the film opens, she persuades her naive boyfriend, Luc (Jeremie Renier), to help her kill a smug, good-looking classmate as an act of love.
After the murder is committed, in an empty gymnasium, the couple flees to the forest to bury the body, and is kidnapped by a scruffy woodsman (Miki Manojlovic), who promises to make them suffer for their sins. He is the type of man who won't feed Alice because he likes his women "thin and crispy", and drags Luc around on a short leash, literally. Needless to say, his torture tactics, which involve cannibalism and gay sex, are not fun to watch.
However, the scenes in the woods are inter-cut with flashbacks that lead up to the murder, and explain why it was committed. The flashbacks are, in their own way, fascinating, but the more we learn about Alice, the more we want her to die a bloody death herself. Despite all the potentially interesting things Ozon has to say about the psychology of the characters and the anatomy of a murder, one can't help but see the proceedings in an exploitative light. He claims that he wanted Criminal Lovers to feel like a fairy tale, but he must have forgotten that fairy tales aren't about gratuitous violence and homosexual rape.
Criminal Lovers turns into a rather pointless psychosexual affair, downright disturbing and equally creepy. Regnier ("Dreamlife of Angels"), Renier ("La Promesse") and Manojlovic (most of Emir Kusturica's films) are all fine actors, and have done little to deserve roles in Ozon's B-movie horror-show. In an age when the Farrelly Brothers rule the box office and John Waters is no longer shocking, Francois Ozon has found new ways to unsettle an audience. If that's talent, then so be it.
-Akiva Gottlieb
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