Horror movies, as any Comp Lit freshman would tell you, are often allegories of something or other. They can, on occasion, be a little more direct and literal in their targets, as seen in works like George Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005) or Joe Dante’s Homecoming (2005), The first is a thinly-veiled call to smash the oligarchy; the second, an anti-war film about zombie soldiers and elections and the war in Iraq, with no veils at all. The French director Xavier Gens’ unremittingly nasty Frontier(s) (Frontière(s)), a refreshing breath of dungeon-dank air, doesn’t quite fall in the same category — it takes too much pleasure in tormenting its characters for it to be taken seriously as political contestation — but there is, at least, an intriguing undercurrent of criticism to the entire grotty mess.
The setup should be vaguely familiar: two groups of young bank-robbing Parisian Arabs fleeing from the police — and also running away from suburban rioters, in the wake of a right-wing election triumph — make a wrong turn and end up at a bed-and-breakfast run by (you’ll never guess) a neo-Nazi cannibal family. The first two men arrive and are greeted by two suspiciously friendly women; they have sex, and — well, it’s obviously too good to be true. By the time the second pair — an estranged couple, the woman a few months pregnant — gets to the inn, the mayhem has already begun.
The dysfunctional family members range from two brothers with hair-trigger tempers, to a couple of sullen silent women, to a gun-toting blonde straight out of an Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS movie. But the most frightening of all is the grand old patriarch, looking spiffy in his brown shirt, played by Jean-Pierre Jorris, who delivers speeches on the virtues of racial purity.
There are no Leatherfaces in this family, but the movie’s gore ancestors are clear: Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1976), and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005). Like these three films, Frontier(s) specifically emerges from a particular historical moment filled with state-sponsored violence, but at the same time frolics in the puddles of blood.
And frolic it does: fans of violent horror (and I count myself among them) would undoubtedly relish all the hijinks with the meathooks and a huge bolt cutter. There’s a moment when one of the antagonists flips on the switch to a table saw, and one can practically feel the delicious, anticipatory collective thrill ripple inside the theater. Gens has a good feel for pacing, even if we’ve seen this narrative structure played out many times.
The reader is correct if you think all this gore overwhelms any kind of meaningful critique of Sarkozy’s immigration policies. But Gens clearly wants to utilize his film as a way of violently intruding into the recent debate, as the notion of frontiers and their political significance resonates throughout the movie. One of Gens’ interesting points made here is that even the extreme right — at least before revenge by butcher implements is exacted against them — would have to make concessions to immigrants in order to literally survive.
But the fact that France has long claimed a coterie of luminaries like Emile Zola, Marie Curie, Maurice Ravel, Charles Aznavour, Isabelle Adjani, and Serge Gainsbourg — of Italian, Polish, Swiss, Armenian, Algerian, and Russian descent, respectively — as quintessentially French optimistically points to a kind of pluralism historically embedded in the French national character.
Or this long list of foreigners may be seen, alternatively, as evidence of the assimilation of immigrants into le peuple franc — but in the case of this film, assimilation in a disgustingly literal fashion.
In any case, it seems somewhat hypocritical on Gens’ part to gesture towards political critique as a tasteless way of adding depth to what is otherwise torture-porn. For instance, one of the final scenes in the movie shows the gaunt and traumatized heroine — all a-tremble, shuffling numbly into the sunlight, her hair crudely shorn, drenched in blood and pig filth — and it looks as if she’s staggering out of Buchenwald in 1945.
The title Frontier(s) is generically, perhaps deliberately vague, as it could mean nothing and everything; “frontiers” could be applied to a science-fiction TV series, a medical documentary, or even gauzy erotica. In this case, it refers to the borders of both nation and good taste — as if everything that came before it didn’t cross those lines already.
(Thanks to Rumsey Taylor for some of the revisions!)
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