Hello, I’m new. First review, with more to come.
Within any horror film- films that celebrates in exploitation of sensitivities- there are always political statements corollary to the body count, even though it may be a task surmountable to trying to tow a Uhaul in a Renault 9 north bound through the US/Mexican border without being stopped by border agents to find much poignant social commentary within 93 minutes of sex and slaughter dubbed “the scariest movie in decades” and stuffed on DVD shelves with a bold “UNRATED” notice to assure that what is inside is in fact gruesome and terrifying. Xavier Gen’s Frontier(s), released as a part of Lion’s Gate’s 2008 After Dark Horror Fest- 8 Films to Die For- series, is very much akin to the trend of “UNRATED” horror movie releases that promises piles of corpses and carnage, but what is different with Frontiers is that there is no need to go through any strain, similar to even trying to get inside of Renault 9, to see the discontent and criticism articulated in the film.
Frontier(s) begins with images of the recent banlieue (low income housing district) riots in Paris, and then focuses in on a group of five young Muslim Parisians, who, just having illegaly procured themselves a large amount of money during the chaos of the rioting, perhaps from looting a bank, are on foot and running from police; gun shot fire is exchanged by both parties. This initial introduction to characters lasts no more than ten minutes in which one of the five is lost due to a stomach wound or some sort, and the four remaining split up and decide to head for the border, agreeing to break up the money between them upon rendezvous.
As Woody Allen once mentioned, if you miss the beginning of the film, you miss it all, and Frontier(s) is a fine example in which the beginning sets the stage for much of the political criticisms explored later on in the film. Aside from Yasmine, the female heroine lead, the Parisians on the run are no lovable bunch: two characters are pictured as despicable goons, and the other is nothing more than a pitiful thug. They are on the run because they have stolen money. They are leaving Paris behind for a new frontier with their new fortune, and that is where all the character development ends. A scant ten to fifteen minutes of getting familiar with the bunch that we will ultimately have to see tortured and brutally destroyed.
The group coordinates to meet at a bed and breakfast type hostel, and immediately, upon arrival at determined destination, the first two banlieue evacuees are terrorized by the backwater proprietors of the bed and breakfast. Yasmine and her companion arrive and are immediately made prey. Frontier(s) leaves no room for the pretension of tension and discomfort to build as the blood hungry agenda of the proprietors is made clear immediately. A bloodbath ensues as the protagonist bunch tries their darnedest to get away alive, though miserably failing to the traps and sadism of the proprietors’ torture and murder compound disguised as a countryside bed and breakfast.
This formula of plot has been exercised myriad times in recent horror films, and, though, as a horror fan I hate to admit it, Frontier(s) is somewhat of a carbon copy of Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses. In fact, where Frontier(s) becomes unique in playing with French politics and history with the family of deranged cannibals, House of 1000 Corpses did previously with its family of backwater psychopaths, as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre did as well. The difference here is that Frontiers is French and speaks to a French audience about the not so proud history of France’s tendencies towards fascism.
The family of antagonists in Frontier(s) is led by a Nazi patriarch who is determined to preserve the purity of his family’s blood through propagation. The family is a hodgepodge of psychopath, ranging from Goetz, a hyper masculine, predatory ruffian with a tendency towards homosexuality, to Eva, a child mother of multitudes of deformed childrenwhich appear to be the product of the attempted mass propagation of the family’s race. Yasmine is forced to submit to the son of the Nazi patriarch father, and, upon Eva’s discovery that Yasmine is with child, the family rings in celebration of the extension of the “pure” blood line, despite Yasmine being 1) a Muslim girl, and 2) with child from another father. The family and its thought processes are rife with contradictions and absurdities, which, were it not for the nature of the film would be problematic, but actually work as a metaphor for France as a country.
From current day right wing politics to the Vichy alignment with Nazi Germany in WWII, Frontier(s) makes allusion after allusion to discontent in France, but, when all is said and done, who is the victim? Who, as viewers of horror films, should we sympathize with, or at least see the director sympathizing with? The beginning of the film, with its lack of aligning the audience with anyone of the characters other than Yasmine, and almost insufficiently at that, points that there is no black and white, and in the end, there is no justifiable cause for applause.
Xavier Gen’s film, though rough in the narrative department, works quite effectively in grusome images as a metaphoric indictment of French politics in this day and age. The film offers up Paris sized sewage systems of gore and painful images to make horror fans feel delightfully nauseated, though I couldn’t help but wonder while viewing Frontier(s) when enough is enough, and what kind of borders exist to discern when all the violence becomes excessive in itself with no point other than working as porn for the sick, demented, or when violence stops being a means for an end and simply becomes cruelty. To sum it all up, Frontier(s) points out that the Renualt 9 is not the only thing that France ought to be ashamed of.