Knife + Heart

In the mid­dle of Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart, Anne (Vanes­sa Par­adis) wan­ders into a gay bar, and watch­es a cabaret per­for­mance in which a she-wolf, in embrac­ing her human beloved, also tears her apart. This per­for­mance of Liebestod reflects some­thing essen­tial about the destruc­tive nature of its imme­di­ate audience’s love.

For porn pro­duc­er Anne has been left utter­ly heart­bro­ken by the end of a 10-year rela­tion­ship, and now finds her­self behav­ing in a preda­to­ry fash­ion towards her ex, the edi­tor Lois (Kate Moran), spy­ing on her, Psy­cho-like, through a peep­hole, stalk­ing her in the streets, and at one point even sex­u­al­ly assault­ing her. ​“You turned into a mon­ster,” Lois will write to Anne.

Set in 1979, and shot in high­ly stylised blues and reds to sug­gest the colour cod­ing of a gial­lo (or of the mon­strous­ly loom­ing high-gloss cin­e­ma of the ​’80s), Knife + Heart is all about the per­ver­sion of pas­sion, and its reflec­tion in per­for­mance. Anne and Lois work – sep­a­rate­ly – on their lat­est porn film, and Anne etch­es the mes­sage ​‘You have killed me’ into one of the reels for Lois to see.

Mean­while, a mys­te­ri­ous leather-masked fig­ure is on the prowl and mur­der­ing male mem­bers of the cast with a switch­blade-enhanced dil­do, enact­ing yet anoth­er sto­ry of love gone wrong. Soon Anne decides to change the title of her lat­est opus from Anal Fury to Homo­ci­dal, and incor­po­rat­ed fic­tion­alised ele­ments of the actu­al mur­der inves­ti­ga­tion into the porn sce­nario. She is also in pur­suit of the killer, fol­low­ing clues that appear in her dreams (shown in pho­to­graph­ic negative).

So Knife + Heart is a gay slash­er, falling some­where between William Friedkin’s Cruis­ing and Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake. But it is also a dreamy evo­ca­tion of a par­tic­u­lar time and place which offers nos­tal­gic ado­ra­tion for a filmic genre (gay porn) that is nor­mal­ly dis­missed as aes­thet­i­cal­ly void. It is a man­nered piece of neon camp that plunges unex­pect­ed­ly into deep­est melan­choly, as well as being an explo­ration of the way that film – that most voyeuris­tic and fetishis­tic of art forms – trig­gers our uncon­scious mem­o­ries and cap­tures our inner­most dreams and desires.

For in Gonzalez’s mir­ror world, Anne’s night­mare (when she falls asleep in a porn the­atre) plays out as a sim­i­lar porn cin­e­ma scene from John Lan­dis’ Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don, while the film’s antag­o­nist looks like the burn-scarred dream slash­er Fred­die Krueger from Wes Craven’s A Night­mare on Elm Street. Here movie mon­sters are mere avatars of a desire that has been denied, repressed or unre­quit­ed, bring­ing their strange mytholo­gies of trans­for­ma­tion into a real world where love hurts, even kills.

No mat­ter how cheap and tawdry Anne’s pro­duc­tions might appear, they are invest­ed with feel­ings of loss and long­ing that are all too gen­uine, and that can arouse the worst as well as the best in any­one view­ing. The result is a lurid­ly coloured, trans­gres­sive­ly queered piece of self-con­scious schlock where cut­ting is the busi­ness of lovesick killers as much as film­mak­ers – and both cut right to the heart.