Knife + Heart – first look review

The very first killing in Yann Gonzalez’s porn world thriller Knife + Heart, show­ing in com­pe­ti­tion at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, is both grue­some and ludi­crous – and is char­ac­ter­is­tic of the entire enter­prise. After a bru­tal stab­bing (not in the lit­er­al but per­haps in the metaphor­i­cal heart), a black crow sud­den­ly comes land­ing next to the corpse of the angel­ic young man. As it returns with each new vic­tim, the white-eyed, stuffed-look­ing bird gets more ridicu­lous and high­lights just how pre­dictable the nar­ra­tive is, instead of ele­vat­ing it to engross­ing lev­els of dream­like abstraction.

Sport­ing a leather coat and bleached hair, Vanes­sa Par­adis plays Anne, an erot­ic film pro­duc­er with a hun­gry heart in Paris, 1979. Her deep long­ing – verg­ing on obses­sion – for her edi­tor Lois (Kate Moran) is sup­posed to com­pli­ment the explic­it­ness of her nine to five, for Gon­za­lez tries to find poet­ry in the dai­ly grind of dif­fi­cult erec­tions, actors’ cama­raderie and easy mon­ey. An artist of the sens­es, Anne also talks in sur­re­al metaphors. Yet by try­ing so hard to sug­gest fan­ta­sy from raw sex­u­al­i­ty, Gon­za­lez fails to go deep.

All the beau­ti­ful colours and bizarre turns of phrase feel removed from the char­ac­ters, tacked on them force­ful­ly to laugh­able effect. It is dif­fi­cult to care for Anne or even for her amus­ing friend and col­league Archibald, played with flair by Nico­las Mau­ry; they don’t dream up their lives so much as go through them like extras on a film set, or inter­change­able phys­i­cal per­form­ers in a porn film.

Anne is also dis­turbed by evoca­tive, vio­lent dreams (of dis­ap­point­ing pro­duc­tion val­ue) that seem con­nect­ed to the repeat­ed mur­ders of her actors. Gonzalez’s try-hard approach proves exhaust­ing as he strug­gles to rec­on­cile his predilec­tion for dra­mat­ic and fan­ta­sist com­po­si­tions with the ser­i­al killer tropes. Going for the essen­tials of the genre, his plot falls into clich­es that stum­ble on a fine line between defend­ing and demon­is­ing homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. The mur­der mys­tery is solved in con­fu­sion and, although aim­ing for tragedy, lands instead on a dis­com­fort­ing sense of relief from those char­ac­ters’ pain.