The opening scenes of Knife + Heart feel achingly familiar: how many films start with a woman in peril, running alone through the dark? Well, this is a film which doesn’t mind turning things on their head, even if the surprises are momentary. Anne (Vanessa Paradis) isn’t running from an assailant; she’s having a minor breakdown instead, and when she phones her girlfriend Lois for moral support in the early hours, it proves to be the final straw for her partner of ten years, who breaks off their relationship. It seems as though these drink-fuelled meltdowns are not so unusual. Anne is devastated, but we don’t see her showing weakness to this extent again. She simply gets back to work as a gay porn director, always looking for novel ideas and approaches to use in her films. She regularly sees Lois, who is also her film editor, but she’s trying to get on with her life whilst respecting Lois’s wishes, so they keep a discreet distance.
This is all disturbed by the disappearance of one of her key talents, whom we see getting dispatched during a liaison with a masked man. Before long, it seems as though someone is specifically targeting her enterprise, as more actors go missing, soon turning up horrifically butchered. Whilst Anne first appeals to the police for help, it seems as though they aren’t too motivated to assist her, citing the fact that the young men she routinely works with are often drifters with complex personal lives, and batting her away with faint reassurances. Eventually, in the face of what is happening she turns sleuth, and begins to investigate what is going on for herself. Her investigation takes her on a strange journey where she eventually uncovers an equally strange, and sad story, albeit one which threatens her friends, loved ones and her own life, as well as her livelihood.
Along the way, the film also plays with ideas of whether art imitates life, life imitates art, or whether the whole process is somehow cyclical. Anne, always the experimenter when it comes to her work, begins to use the unfolding case as a the inspiration for a very unusual kind of film, writing the real life goings-on into a script and filming a weird new hybrid of erotica and horror. It also transpires that the rest of her filmography plays a key role in the plot, too. All of this – bearing in mind that Knife + Heart is set in 1979 – allows for some glorious visuals. Sequences from Anne’s films are all refracted through plausibly vintage camera and celluloid, though the film itself is just as carefully framed and styled, with rich use of colour and a careful eye for stylistics. The M83 soundtrack is great, too, and fits really well. Paradis, a veteran actress albeit primarily in Francophone cinema, fits the bill perfectly here: whilst you don’t get particularly close to her character, I think that works given the context of the plot, and she looks great, with (and pardon me this observation) a fantastic aesthetic and wardrobe. In fact, it’s nice to see that the two lead female actresses are somewhat older, whilst it’s the guys that are far younger; it’s not an inversion which will change your life, granted, but it’s somewhat refreshing nonetheless, and I didn’t feel that this was simply driven by our current predilection for ‘subverting expectations’ by dithering with gender roles. It just works nicely. There are some very angry user reviews on IMDb complaining about the gay content, though I have to say that after the initial mild surprise of it being men not women getting it on FOR A CHANGE, it too simply settles down as a plot device, a reasonable framework for the rest of the film which allows interesting exploration of its themes.
My only minor gripe with Knife + Heart is that it undergoes a few tonal shifts where the film almost seems to invite you to laugh; if not laugh outright, then (for instance) some of the new film project scenes go from the sublime to the ridiculous, to the extent that you are taken out of the film as a whole for a moment, and made to ponder how seriously you ought to be taking things. Perhaps this is intended as a little light relief, or perhaps I just read it that way, but ultimately, a lot of the classic giallo cinema which clearly influences Knife + Heart does very similar things, particularly when it comes to plot exposition. Many has been the time when the ‘who’ of the whodunnit has been both impossible and impossibly silly. In that respect, director Yann Gonzalez could be said to be emulating the greats, paying lip service to his influences – though not, at least, by turning the ending of his film into a farce; things eventually play out in an engagingly tragic, trippy, grisly manner.
Overall, then, Knife + Heart is a lavish visual gift with a remarkable soundscape and plenty else to recommend it. It’s wholeheartedly recommended to fans of giallo cinema, and it does enough to set itself apart from the whole host of love letters to that genre which have popped up of late – mainly by having its own story to tell, rather than simply prioritising the aesthetics and hoping that the rest falls into place.
Knife + Heart played at the Sheffield Celluloid Screams Film Festival in October 2018.