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Even though Damien Odoul's 'Le Souffle' won awards at film festivals across Europe on its release in 2001, including a special jury prize at Venice it did not pick up an English distributor for a couple of years. Damien Odoul’s directorial career is decidedly low key in comparison to his contemporaries. His career thus far including 2004’s ‘En Attendant Le Deluge’ seemingly passing many critics and cinema-goers alike. 'Le Souffle', Odoul's second feature (his debut was 1992’s Morasseix!) is a coming-of-age tale set in rural France. Having been abandoned by his parents, the plot centres on a young teenager who is spending the summer on his uncle's farm. Far from a romantic idyll, the film depicts a moody, violent world that refuses to conform to the traits of teenage-themed cinema. This is no summer of love and discovery. It is a summer of loneliness, ennui, and death.
The film charts a single day in the life of David (Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc), a sullen, boorish teenager as he and his uncle prepare for a feast of wine and barbecue with his uncle's friends: a grotesquery of stereotypical French peasants. In between the preparations, David listens to rap music (denoting the fact he is a city boy - an urban character), masturbates, torments farm animals, and slips into daytime reveries. Having been invited to eat and drink wine with his uncle’s friends, David gets drunk and begins an unstable passage into masculine brutality. Grabbing a rifle, he sets off into the surrounding countryside to meet a local boy. Together, they traipse across the French countryside with a horse, in scenes that recall Rob Reiner’s American classic, ‘Stand by Me’ (1986). Unlike, Reiner’s much loved cult classic, ‘Le Souffle’ is possessed with a dark heart. A shocking, pointless act of violence guided by teenage angst, frustration and alcohol ensures that David’s summer is one he will never forget.
Damien Odoul’s film is no cathartic, epiphany-filled narrative in which the characters realise or acknowledge the brutal reality of their lives. The film suggests David dreams certain events and merely fantasies about violent acts. Although steeped in Bressonian realism of tight close ups, static framing, and taut editing, ‘Le Souffle’ often breaks out into surrealism - offering the viewer an interior exhibition of David’s inner life - in these scenes, David struggles, covered in mud, seemingly wrestling against obscured adult figures, or he runs on all hands and knees imitating the movements of a dog. These scenes are played in slow motion, use heavily distorted sound, with bleached out monochrome photography. It is clear that David’s dreams are places in which he rages at authority figures, feels bestial and savage. Another more tender reverie sees him in a swimming pool with his imaginary girlfriend, Aurore. It is clear that David, although in many ways a typical teenager feels disconnected from his life and surroundings.
These disturbingly mysterious images neither confirm that David is indeed a deranged young man or a complete fantasist. Odoul’s aesthetic approach leaves the film wide open to interpretation, neither does it attempt to rationalise his character, or his behaviour. Abandonment is a predominant theme within the film. David has been left with his uncle when he clearly does not want to be there. The narrative reveals that David’s father left home and seems to have spent a lot of the family money irresponsibly. A character informs David during the barbecue, ‘Fathers always leave their sons’. The mother is also absent and there is an air of resentment within David. The inconclusive psychological strands and a narrative that traverses reality and dream can potentially leave the viewer puzzled as to what the director’s intentions for the film are and thus they may be left feeling that it is merely a cinematic exercise or homage to the films of Bresson, Truffaut and Cocteau.
‘Le Souffle’ is set in a tough rural environment that is heavily centred on masculinity and ritual. In many ways, the character of David can be interpreted as an innocent being brutalised by his uncle and friends into becoming a real man...or their version of a real man - a hard-drinking, instinctive type. As one character tells David, ‘You can’t be happy if you think too much’. However, even this viewpoint is contradicted. David’s uncle and his friends are garrulously pleasant to him. Slightly grotesque, somewhat bullying figures, these men with their bizarre nostalgic memories (one character fondly remembers being shot in the head by his father) wish to include David in their world, bestowing upon him a sense of belonging and manhood. After David vomits and passes out due to heavy drinking, they gather round and take care of him. There is a fraternal quality to their way of life that David is invited to take a part in if he so wishes. That David refuses their initiation ritual highlights his status as an outsider, not only metaphorically but also symbolically. Odoul implies that the French peasantry, however odd and overtly masculine, is rife with camaraderie and a sense of belonging, of community. It is David’s troubled psychology and city attitude that perhaps cannot fully allow him to cross over into their world. David is representational of the disturbed and complex urban attitude coming into contact with the volatile, indifferent, natural world of the countryside.
Symbolic of the confusion of teenage life and its struggles with emotion, the film constantly fluctuates between the juvenile expression of boredom and David’s deeper angst that culminates in shocking violence, which the film refuses to clarify. David's laconic murdering of a friend is a seemingly random event, there being no cause or effect. There is no forthcoming punishment or evidence of a mental transition within the character. David sheds more tears at his frustration in physically dealing with the dead boy and his horse, than the actual killing.
A remarkable element of the film - beyond its ambiguous narrative and aesthetic blend of realism and surrealism, is the cinematography by Pascale Granel. Filmed in high-contrast monochrome, it allows for some truly exquisite shots. Littered with the carcasses of dead and ill animals, the farmyard is a decaying landscape - representative of a dying world. The walls are bare, and uninviting, although set on a hot summer day, there is an unnatural coldness to the film. It is a world of little warmth and comfort. The film is comprised of beautifully composed images of David and his languorous world. He is artfully framed, as he stumbles around the farmyard in a drunken stupor, runs through the woods with a rifle or in what appears to be another dream sequence; he enters an almost-fairy-tale castle to see his imaginary, upper class girlfriend. As noted, there seems to be a prevailing spirit of Bressonian cinema within ‘Le Souffle’. ‘Au Hasard Balthazar’ and ‘Mouchette’ are reference points.
The lack of a musical score to accompany the film is typical of a film that sets out to defy genre conventions. The film’s sound design is naturalistic - the sound of wind, the screams of slaughtered animals, the birds twittering rainfall are used to create a naturalistic atmosphere. When music is introduced, via the headphones on David’s Walkman, it is crude rap music which strikingly highlights David’s city origins.
Damien Odoul chose to cast nonprofessional actors, a tactic employed by Bresson, on many occasions. The acting in ‘Le Souffle’ is first rate. The performance of Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc as David, with his mixture of cockiness, swaggering angst, sullenness and humour is the linchpin of the entire film. The shot of Bonnetblanc walking across a field with his rifle hanging off his shoulders would perhaps have been praised as an iconic moment in French cinema if the reception of the film had been greater. Alas, ‘Le Souffle’ remains a little seen, albeit award-winning, film. Taking memories from his own summers spent in rural Limousin, Odoul creates a work of art that is personal, stylish, and perplexingly ambiguous. ‘Le Souffle’ is a coming-of-age story like no other. In its refusal to offer the audience psychologically rounded characters, clear motives and an emotional pay-off, Damien Odoul’s phantasmagoria plays out as a savage and nightmarish portrayal of the French countryside in which death is ever prevalent. The world of ‘Le Souffle’ is violent and contradictory, in which a confused teenage figure daydreams, drinks, longs for his abandonment to end, and perhaps commits murder. Damien Odoul’s stylish depiction of lost youth is a brilliant work in contemporary French cinema.
Country: France
Budget:
Length: 75mins
Filmography:
‘Stand By Me’, 1986, Rob Reiner, Act III
'Morasseix', 1992, Damien Odoul, France 2 Cinéma
Pub/2007
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