Past Misdeeds: Livide (2011)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Lucie Klavel (the fantastic Chloé Coulloud) starts a practicum with mobile geriatric nurse Catherine Wilson (Catherine Jacob) as part of her training. One of the patients the rather cynical Wilson visits once a day is former famous ballet teacher Madame Jessel (Marie-Claude Pietragalla). Madame is very very old, and not much more than a husk of a woman hovering forever between life and death in a coma in her large, increasingly creepy, home. She is also supposed to be very rich; if Lucie believes what Wilson tells her, there's said to be some sort of treasure hidden away in the house, but Wilson has never found it, even though she tried.

When Lucie tells the story to her boyfriend Will (Félix Moati), he can't help but see himself, his brother Ben (Jérémy Kapone) and Lucie breaking into the house and finding Jessel's treasure. Thus, they could leave their certain futures of dead-end jobs and loveless families behind. At first, Lucie is less than thrilled by Will's idea but some family trouble with her father and a visit by/hallucination of her dead mother (Béatrice Dalle) change her mind. It would, after all be a dream to just have enough money to flee and leave all troubles behind (that's how money works, right?). If Lucie knew what the audience knows about Wilson and her connection to a series of local child disappearances, she probably would have second thoughts about her new life of crime, but she doesn't.

When the trio break into Jessel's house - on Halloween night, no less - they find rather more than they would have wished for; finding the taxidermied body of Jessel's daughter Anna (Chloé Marcq) in a ballerina outfit in a room set up as a grotesque, life-sized music box is just the beginning of an ordeal that becomes increasingly surreal.

I wasn't much of a fan of Alexandre Bustillo's and Julien Maury's first film, Inside/À l'intérieur. That film's overdose of shocking violence was so thick, and its grotesqueness so at odds with the narrative tone I ended up not shocked but provoked to laughter, some fine acting and the directors' irreproachable technical abilities notwithstanding.

Livide still contains its share of physically improbable (and rather awesome) gore, but where Inside’s sense of the grotesque and its hyper-realist mood collided in a bad way, Livide haunts a place between the supernatural movies of Dario Argento (whose Suspiria gets a shout-out that suggests this as an alternative version of Mother of Tears perhaps more fit for those disappointed by the Argento movie's closeness to the Demoni films and other movies of that style rather than Suspiria and Inferno; I'm one of the crazy-people who actually liked Mother of Tears, so don't ask me, please), Fulci in his brilliant phase, and European fairy tales in their pre-bourgeois form before the Brothers Grimm tamed them for a more uptight audience. In that context, the film's sense of the grotesque and the grotesquely violent is particularly effective, for a film that does not strive to be a copy of reality can quite pleasurably creep along paths its naturalistic brethren should eschew.

In its narrative structure Livide is a rather fascinating example of a movie which fulfils everything that could be asked for from a very generic horror movie while still having a mind completely of its own. Every viewer even slightly in tune with the horror genre will of course know the comatose ballet teacher to be anything but the mild type of living dead her permanent sleeping habits would suggest her to be, and will expect her to do rather nasty things to our protagonists when they break into her realm; we all know tune and words to this particular song by heart.

However, at the same time it sings this tune, Livide isn't at all willing to accept its simple plot set-up as an excuse to only tell us a story we already know too well in exactly the way we expect. At first slowly, then with increasing intensity, the film's subtext about young women living in more or less terrible situations trying to free themselves takes control of Livide's more generic elements; the more fantastic the film's surface becomes, the more its symbolic level becomes an indistinguishable part of this surface, until the film ends in a scene that's perfectly in keeping with the fairy tales it uses for its own ends, and also completely divorced from reality as most people see it, or expect to see in their modern horror movies. Unexpectedly, Livide also allows itself to end on a hopeful note it can only reach because it dares to humanize (at least one of) its monsters; freedom - such as it is (the film seems neither painfully optimistic nor cynical about freedom's nature) - is won from recognizing a shared humanity between monster and human, of their outward differences, even their identities, dissolving by way of the grotesque. Like in the literary horrors of Caitlin R. Kiernan, of whose books Livide's treatment of the grotesque and the monstrous, reminds me quite a bit, there's not only danger and horror to be found in facing monsters but also beauty and (at least some kind of) truth.


In this context, it seems nearly irrelevant that Livide at the same time also just works very well as a surreal and moody horror film, but work well it does; it's not impossible that exactly its grounding in safe genre formulas is what gives Livide its power.