Director: Romain de Saint-Blanquat
Writers: Romain de Saint-Blanquat
Stars: Fred Blin, Léonie Dahan-Lamort, Lilith Grasmug
Synopsis: A Catholic schoolgirl is convinced tonight is her last night on Earth and decides to attend a costume party with her best friend.
Taking its inspirations from Giallo horror and 2000s teen coming-of-age films, with a look and atmosphere that’s reminiscent of the sixties, Romain de Saint-Blanquat’s Bitten (La Morsure) delivers some fascinating (and occasionally haunting) visuals that stay with the viewer. But, as it runs its course, the film’s ideas on youth, death, love, and teenage angst go for a fifty-fifty split between hollow and fascinating for its intriguing concept, ending with a pretty anti-climatic finale that leaves you wanting more.
Many genre combinations have appeared and disappeared in horror cinema, often inciting means to revisit them years after. Horror and comedy have been interlaced with one another for what seems like forever. The same goes for the coming-of-age story, sci-fi, fantasy, and many other genres and stories. But I don’t think (at least to my recollection) anybody has blended the Giallo horror visual aesthetics with vampirism and added a manic pixie dream girl main character from the 2000s as a cherry on top of the strange dark sundae. All of this sounds like a fascinating, yet messy feature with plenty on its table. And it is, as we see in Romain de Saint-Blanquat’s feature-length directorial debut Bitten (La Morsure), which is making its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival. While interesting on paper, the movie doesn’t fully crack the potential of its horror-drama-comedy genre combinations. But it does have something going for it via its imagery and flash.
Set in the year 1967 on Ash Wednesday, a day of repentance for all Catholics, a weird, ominous collage of ritual-like images introduces Romain de Saint-Blanquat’s Bitten, as it gets its look from the VHS 80s horror pictures and the grainy feeling of vintage 60s cameras. As a house burns down, a girl with a cross on her forehead looks terrified at a dark figure staring back at her. Her makeup runs down her face as the fire destroys everything in its path. All of a sudden, a young woman named Françoise (Léonie Dahan-Lamort) – a student in a Catholic convent school in the middle of France – wakes up from her deep slumber; was it a bad dream… or was it a vision of an upcoming calamity? She’s perplexed by her nightmare as it all feels too real. To calm herself down and ease her mind, Françoise asks her classmate and best friend Delphine (Lilith Grasmug) to get out of bed.
You immediately see that the two friends are polar opposites, as usual when it comes to quirky (or with a similar tone) coming-of-age films. While Françoise is more erratic and seems like the one who makes the rash decisions in the group, Delphine is more calm and pensive – in a sense, she’s more mature and occasionally repentant with her faith. Delphine is her alter ego, but one that doesn’t drag the other one down; they complement each other in various ways. However, there’s a chance that she might not save her in their next venture together. “Clockwise if I am to live, counterclockwise if I am to die.” When playing with a “gifted” pendulum, Françoise is convinced she has one more night to live. And if that’s the case, she wants to savor her final moments on Earth. So, they go to a hidden house party in the woods to find some boys, ending their curiosity with adolescence and love once and for all.
Guided by her rash instincts and inquisitiveness for what the world has to offer, given that she doesn’t see much behind the fences that cover the convent school’s ground, Françoise makes a couple of dangerous decisions during her “dream night” – involving herself with a riotous crowd in exchange for cigarettes, a lonesome adult who keeps on following them (a plot point in the story which I don’t understand its meaning or purpose), and drinking until she pukes. She just wants a change from her monotonous life, which sets the path for these misadventures. But what they don’t expect is that something wicked this way comes. This night will be one to remember; the rebellious girl will meet a man with a secret, and her more tame friend is approached by a charming boy. And it was at this point in the film, almost at the thirty-minute mark, the shifting flow of its ideas began, ranging from fascinating to questionable.
As the story develops, you begin to feel the cinematic inspirations Romain de Saint-Blanquat uses for his debut feature, combining the atmosphere of Giallo horror pictures with the teen coming-of-age trappings of the cult classic Ghost World, although with a more manic pixie dream girl vibe attached to its main character – and on top of it all having a banging sixties soundtrack. These stylistic choices make a magnetic force that constantly pulls your eyes to the screen. It is almost like an homage to its inspirations. Romain de Saint-Blanquat uses the essence of its sixties obstreperous setting rather than recreating it on-screen so the audience can be more immersed in this sensory experience. When you add the talent of the young performers to this visual mixture, it becomes an even more immersive tale. During the moments when the camera focuses on them, the director blends their facial expressions with nightmarish visions, just like the ones that introduce the film, often creating an illusory array of frames that cause more emotional reactions than the words being spoken.
Although the imagery and cinematography by Martin Roux do create some occasional impacting visuals that stay with the viewer for a fleeting moment, the main problems that Bitten has are the development of its narrative and its anticlimactic conclusion that leaves more questions than answers in a way that doesn’t entice a conversation afterward. The second half of Bitten takes a more talkative approach instead of the horror-esque maneuvers it was previously implementing. This should have paved the way for a broader discussion on the previous topics it tackled, such as love, death, religion, and teenage angst. Yet, it never reaches a point where it moves you the same way as it did with this imagery beforehand. I believe this has to do with adding vampirism into the tale. Not all of the film’s ideas have a purpose or contain the thematic heft to uplift its convictions. But most of them that arrive in the middle and third act feel hollow. And when you compare it to what was presented during the introductory one, it makes you less intrigued by what the film has to offer as it goes.
