Appearing midway-through what might once have been the new normal of the New Extremity movement of the Nineties and early Noughties, Calvaire (2004) was, nonetheless, an odd and interesting fit for that movement. No doubt it was helped into existence by the advent of films like Irréversible, which had been released two years prior (sharing its cinematographer, Benoît Debie, some of the same wheeling, nauseating camerawork and scenes, as well as the aesthetics of the opening credits) but – for the most part – Calvaire is a much quieter, more brooding film. Yet we shouldn’t mistake its frequent lulls in sound, minimal dialogue and lack of soundtrack for an absence of horror: it may be quieter, but it’s quietly devastating, leaving many of its biggest questions to hang in the gloomy silence along with everything else. Those glaring red and black opening credits may be the last we’ll see of the colour red for the best part of the first hour, but it’s the way Calvaire unravels reality which really provides its lasting appeal, making its moments of bloodshed more a symbol of its disorder than its chief purpose.
It manages to foreshadow all of this with a certain amount of farce and grim humour, too: we meet performer Marc (Laurent Lucas) just prior to a gig; he’s applying makeup and clearly takes the whole thing seriously, but the show is a regular stint at an old people’s home and, with his cape and gaudy backdrop, it all looks more like a bad holiday camp than a big career move. But the people there love him; one of his quasi-ridiculous little numbers culminates in an elderly lady desperate to relive the passion of youth. Tellingly, she has allowed herself to believe in his singing, which is relevant – horribly relevant – later. Even the staff are inconsolable that he’s heading off to a special Christmas gala in the South of Belgium (cue one Brigitte Lahaie cameo, and her character is keen enough to tuck some intimate polaroids into his payment envelope).
Marc is faintly embarrassed by it all; he’s more than happy to get going, on a bitter midwinter drive into the heart of the Liège Province. He is also thirsting after fame; this is why he’s willing to drive cross-country in the run up to Xmas – he wants to get better-known, to ‘grow his brand’, as we might say now. It’s soon getting late and dark, however, so he’s relieved to spot a sign for a nearby inn, particularly when the ubiquitous van trouble kicks in and, one should-I-laugh sequence later, he reaches Bartel’s place. Bartel (Jackie Berroyer) claims a kind of kinship with Marc in that he’s a fellow entertainer, and offers him a room in the deserted, but fairly comfortable inn, promising to help him with his van in the morning. Marc’s stay on the premises is, however, rather longer than expected.
Calvaire and identity
Whilst many of the elements have a familiar ring – car trouble, remote rural location, isolated people – Calvaire has a surprisingly light touch which lasts right up until the moment it really, really doesn’t. Bartel is an unassuming sort of character; he’s a little socially awkward, sure, but not instantly threatening or alarming. He seems to be making some earnest, blundering attempts to help Marc, right down to towing his van back to the inn with the handbrake on, but let’s be fair, his mechanical interventions get a lot more serious than that. Local lad Boris (Jean-Luc Couchard) seems faintly harmless too, and in fact, stays that way: his monomania for finding his lost dog serves for a kind of scaled-down obsession and a disconnect with reality which he shares with all of his near neighbours. We never have any certainty about who Boris is, or how he fits into this very small, very remote community, but we believe he’s probably looking for a dog which has been gone a long time. He presents as a grown man, but behaves like a child, and gets addressed as though he were a child, too. These people have form for seeing things which aren’t really there.
But there’s more to Boris and his frustrated search for ‘Bella’ than just some quaint, if unhinged fella constantly searching the woods for something. His ability to, eventually, make do with a calf (which he enthusiastically believes is his beloved pup) stems from Bartel’s advice to be “obstinate” enough to keep looking. It seems that obstinacy is enough to completely overthrow reason in this film; having heard Bartel’s descriptions of his wife, Gloria, who left him, it seems his own obstinacy allows him to quite suddenly see Marc as Gloria. Not as a stand-in, but as the woman herself. Whilst it’s not fully clear if this was always the plan, or whether it’s a plan which emerged just as suddenly when Marc turned out to be the unwitting guest, the switch from seeing Marc as himself to someone else entirely is the film’s sharpest, queasiest moment. We simply have an echo of it in Boris; obstinacy here is extreme, replacing any and all appeals to reason. In fact, Marc barely bothers to attempt doing it. He only ever very weakly tries to dissuade Bartel from his new beliefs and behaviours; later in the film, he fully accepts his new role, offering one short, but revealing line. Some of this is fear, sure, but is it the whole picture?
It could be that Marc himself is more used to assuming a new identity than it at first seems. Whilst he makes one or two grabs for his old name – he’s ‘Marc’, not ‘Gloria’ – there isn’t a great sense of affinity with his old self, and perhaps this can be partially explained by the ID which Bartel finds in Marc’s van. Early in the film, Bartel is contenting himself by searching the van, pocketing anything which appeals to him, or could be of use to Marc. But in the glovebox, he discovers Marc’s driver’s license and an ID card – neither of which display the name of Marc Stevens, but Pavel Volganski instead. The accompanying photographs are not terribly clear, but it looks like an earlier incarnation of Marc. It could be an innocent showbiz name-change – Pavel Volganski doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue as well as Marc Stevens does, at least in North-western Europe – but on a deeper level, it shows a man who has already reinvented himself at least once, picking a new name – one which masks his origins – to match his career, as well as a new appearance. If once is acceptable, perhaps there’s something on a deeper level with him which means he doesn’t react as strongly as many would; names are already transitory, replaceable and disposable. Add shock, terror and abuse to that, and the strong reclamation of identity which many audiences might have expected, never comes to fruition. Again, Marc’s behaviour at this juncture remains one of the film’s big, strange questions.
‘That you’ll fly away one day…’ music as trigger
What exactly causes all of this, though? Bartel is chatting to Marc as Marc, amiably enough, for the first day he spends at the inn. He has also already covertly broken into the van, looking over mementos of Marc’s life – publicity posters, photographs, and of course the mysterious ID. In effect, he has a sense of Marc’s backstory, and seems to accept it, whilst (maybe significantly) not ever bothering to challenge him as Pavel. The key moment which seems to precipitate the bizarre shift in Bartel happens at dinner one evening. We, as an audience, already have a clue that music in the film invites characters to behave in out-of-the-ordinary ways; we remember how the film’s last real-life women respond to Marc’s performance at the old folk’s home. So, when Bartel pressures Marc to sing for him, and knowing that his wife Gloria was also a singer, we may already feel prepared for some kind of …event.
This and this alone seems to do it: immediately, the night takes on a significance for Bartel, a moment to be treasured, and a special memory. Uh-oh. Marc must ponder whether he just put too much into his acapella performance, because the next morning, Bartel has convinced himself that Gloria is back; he torches the van to be sure she isn’t going anywhere (not that it was going anywhere without a battery), and this is just the start of Marc’s new mistaken identity. It all seems to echo the behaviour of Madame Langhoff, the elderly lady at the start of the film who is so captivated by Marc doing the whole ‘look into their eyes’ routine during a song that she takes him entirely seriously, coming to his dressing room to clumsily try her hand at seduction. When rebuffed, she pours hatred and scorn on herself. It seems that Marc’s music – even these rather trite easy listening ballads – have had a similar effect on Mademoiselle Vicky (Lahaie), who begs him to return as soon as he can.
It’s interesting that a film without a soundtrack places so much weight on its internal music, but it clearly matters in Calvaire. We’re forewarned, and then – after Bartel’s Gloria delusion takes hold – we get the bar scene, where Stan le Pianiste successfully revs up the room with a frenetic, discordant number which puts everyone in the mood for a good ol’ home invasion, to take back what they want from Chez Bartel. Not for nothing, then, is the film’s opening line a lyric: ‘Day after day, life is merely survival.’ Music goes from livelihood, to demand, to element of violence: its lyrics pick out ideas about futility and lost love and then weave them into major themes.
The absent female
However, alongside the discourse about music and loss, reality and unreality, we have to remember that Bartel’s belief in Marc as Gloria exhibits a wide, unpalatable range of attitudes towards women which run throughout Calvaire; it’s just that, here we see it all happening to a man. Women as a group are almost entirely absent from the film, after its opening couple of scenes; you could argue that they’re made a little ridiculous even then, these older women both so mesmerised by a two-bit performance that they’d risk their marriages and jobs for a quick tumble with the cape guy, even if he has a handsome face. But it’s when Marc goes on the road, heading to the backwoods of Liège, that things kick up a gear. Just as a later entrant in the New Extremity movement – Frontière(s) (2007) – teases out tacit attitudes towards race, albeit in much bloodier ways, so it seems that the bedrock of Calvaire hinges upon tacit attitudes towards women.
Firstly, there are no women left in the village at all; it also sounds, for all the world, as though they were always scarce. Very scarce. Excepting Gloria Bartel, no one makes mention of their own wives; we don’t see them; the men at the village bar only refer to Gloria, and soon seem to be part of the same delusion about Marc (which layers uncanny on uncanny, quite frankly). It’s a bleak discourse arranged around a number of horrifying little vignettes. The only sexual scenes in the film invoke rape; there’s also the scene where a number of the men seem to be initiating one of their number into a spot of zoophilia. Of course, this showcases an isolated farming community just as strange as any in the horror tradition, but bereft of the one woman they seem to have known, it looks as though the men have to make their own entertainment. Later in the film, Bartel’s speech-destroying reluctance to go into the village seems to be linked to Gloria: he turns up at the bar to declare that none of the men are allowed anywhere near his wife now that ‘she’ is home; this implies either that they have slept with her, or that he’s afraid they have, or might, but the concepts of ownership, punishment and abuse are present any time his wife gets mentioned. They just happen to be put particularly strongly at this moment.
Assuming that Gloria is/was a real person – if she is, then no bloody wonder she left – then her husband’s proprietorial attitude towards her is appalling, and just happens to be playing out around the unwitting male who has wandered into her deserted life. Here, a man is forced into a passive and compliant role, subject to vile gendered language, held prisoner, made to participate in a domestic setting (and then mocked for crying). It is usually intimated rather than shown, but the likelihood is that Bartel is insisting on sex with Marc; we do see one scene which suggests as much will happen. And, after the home invasion, Marc’s attempts to seek help are met with more mockery, rape and violence from a group of men who are themselves perfectly happy to see what Bartel saw. Marc’s final escape is from Orton (Noé frequent collaborator Philippe Nahon) and his sons, who equally seem to see Marc as Gloria. Again, it seems they see what they want to see, right down to Orton’s pleas for ‘Gloria’ to set his mind at rest about their former relationship. Was there one? What is real here?
Whilst some commentators have felt that the film explores a homosexuality subtext, I would disagree: these people aren’t convincing themselves that Marc is a woman to justify their homosexuality, but rather are content to see anyone as a woman provided they’re wearing a sundress and occupying the prerequisite space. The little trappings of femininity here happen to be weaponised against Marc, making him into something he’s not: a dress, a song, that’s all it takes to dismiss ‘Marc’ altogether. And it isn’t much, but it’s enough to justify the often casually-accepted attitudes towards women being forced onto an unwitting male stranger. Laurent Lucas even gets to enact the female horror role of being tied to a chair (admittedly a rarer act in 2004) and having his head shaved as punishment, and to make him too ugly to sexually assault, which Bartel thinks will keep ‘Gloria’ that bit safer. The shaven head penance pops back up in Frontière(s), by the way, and plenty of other places too. Perhaps Marc can’t strive for his identity because he has immediately taken on the studied, necessary passivity of a woman aiming to survive. Even now, on the other side of that, it’s quite unusual to see a male character escaping quite so far and for quite as long: this is usually the preserve of the final girl, thrown the sop of an incredulous bloodstained survival after ninety minutes of fixated carnage. And, if you think of the big hitters of the New Extremity films, it tends to be women who suffer most; Marc is an outlier here, drawing attention to types and degrees of violence usually reserved for female characters, and his last line in the film is spoken as Gloria, either as a bizarre kindness or because he can no longer keep sight of his old self at all.
Last words
It’s interesting that the Anglicised title – The Ordeal – just never seemed to fully stick for Anglophone audiences. And yet, Calvaire – or, Calvary – has a religious resonance which itself might be lost on a fair few audience members, if they’re irreligious or indifferent. It certainly is an ‘ordeal’ – no one would dispute it – but naming the film for the place of Jesus’s crucifixion and death calls to mind additional ideas about penance and forgiveness which fit well with the film’s themes. Religion itself occupies a kind of present-absence in the film: there but not there, a cobwebbed figure of Christ on a windowsill, a grotesque partial crucifixion as punishment for misdeeds, and a towering statue of the crucified Christ at the end of the film. Marc arrives at the inn at Christmas; Bartel jokes to himself down the defunct phoneline that Marc may have to stay until Easter.
So the stage is set with religious ideas and symbols, which do more than enough to make Marc’s ordeal resonate with the idea of penance for sin. This is portrayed in no uncertain terms – Marc spends some time literally nailed to a cross – but in other respects, his suffering seems more symbolic: he is the absent wife, the heartless mistress, the indifferent performer – all at once. The result is a world where no one speaks sense, no one behaves justifiably, no one provides full closure, but the sense of expiation throughout Calvaire is impossible to mistake. As such it remains a defiantly original, unsettling, gripping film which rewards your patience with a whole host of ideas to ponder. It’s a clever, artistic, slow-burn horror which leaves behind a sense of foreboding, punctuated with both questions and statements about gender, power, selfhood and sin.
Calvaire (2004) is about to get a digital re-release from Blue Finch Film Releasing. It’s available from 19th September.