Past Misdeeds: Le Seuil Du Vide (1974)

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.


The painter Wanda (Dominique Erlanger) flees from the rather bitter end of a love affair, chancing into renting a small, windowless, uncommonly shaped room in Paris. Her landlady warns her not to open a locked door in her room beckoning to Wanda, but the mysterious portal does of course not stay locked for long. At first the blackness of the void lurks behind it, curiously reflecting the light not in the way normal darkness should.

In an impulse between curiosity and self-destructiveness, Wanda decides to paint inside of the void. From then on, her behaviour changes rapidly. At times, it seems like the artist is becoming a different, older person altogether. She also has meetings with the not quite right elderly that might just be hallucinations of a haunted mind, and has visions which seem to hint at coming doom. Wanda may be dreaming, or she may be the victim of a magickal attack and a rather roundabout occult conspiracy.

As far as the Internet tells me, Le Seuil Du Vide's director Jean-Francois Davy was better known for his pornography (softcore? hardcore? who knows?) when this was made, but the film goes in quite a different direction than one would expect, eschewing directly exploitational elements more than many contemporary art movies did. If you're going into this hoping for breasts and blood, you will be sorely disappointed.

There is no good reason to be disappointed here, though, because Davy is not trying to go for that type of European movie of the fantastic at all. Instead, Davy works in the same realm as Jean Rollin in his less explicitly erotic moments, creating a very personal mood of the strange and the fantastic that lacks obviousness. A different director could have told the same story Davy tells as a thriller about an occult conspiracy, or as an art house film about a woman losing her grip on reality after a love affair gone bad, but Le Seuil feels divorced from these possibilities.

Davy seems to have no interest in being thrilling, or in downgrading the experiences of his audience or his heroine into the realm of the mere allegorical; he is in the business of turning his film into a world of its own, with rules that are different from those in our world, but also quite different from the rules most other movies decide to follow.

At times, the director's visual world threatens to become a little too private, a little too divorced from the idea of communicating with an audience, but is usually saved from becoming too self-indulgent in the wrong direction by Dominique Erlanger's performance. She has the slightly girlish charm French cinema (of every persuasion) is so obsessed with, yet she also manages to lead the viewer through the film's more unclear passages through an ability to stay believable as a real person in moments of greatest unreality.


Le Seuil Du Vide is a very peculiar film, deeply entrenched in very French ideas about the use of the fantastic in movies, as little interested in the narrative structures of genre cinema as a film can be while still being part of genre cinema.