DuCournau seems to want us to feel as squeamish watching her film as a young girl does about the prospect of leaving the nest - with all that that entails (namely, boys, plucking your eyebrows, waxing your vagina, etc.). Not that the latter doesn’t have a clear purpose. I enjoyed Raw‘s wit a lot more than I did its gross-out stunts, if I’m being honest. Who tells Justine helpfully, “If you use two fingers it comes up faster.” One clue that this is supposed to be universal is when Justine leaves her dorm stall after an intense session of puking up raw meat to find a fellow freshman who heard her retching. In the same way, DuCournau has essentially created a body horror based on body horror. Justine’s lust for flesh is all tied up with her sexuality, see, and the girl who arrived at college a nerdy vegetarian virgin suddenly has all kinds of confusing new feelings she can’t control - “lust for flesh” becoming something of a double entendre. After an initiation ritual in which she chugs a raw rabbit kidney, she develops an insatiable (and more importantly embarrassing) meatlust, smuggling hamburger patties in her lab coat and gnawing raw chicken breast fresh from the mini fridge. That’s the basic theme of Raw (which DuCournau wrote and directed), in which college freshman Justine (Garance Marillier) leaves her parents’ nice, vegetarian home to join her older sister at a freewheeling veterinarian’s college (seriously). Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.Have you ever noticed that cannibalism is a lot like burgeoning sexuality? Julia DuCournau has. But anyone who has ever felt shamed for their desires will recognize themselves in Justine, even of they have never found themselves hunched on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, tearing into a slab of raw fish. Body horror fans will find much to satisfy their own taste for blood in “Raw,” without venturing to guess what the filmmaker might be trying to say. In interviews, Ducournau resists pinning down meaning or metaphor. These stark images are juxtaposed with Justine on her hands and knees, snapping for a taste of flesh the way bystanders must pull Justine and Alexia off each other during a fight as if they were rabid dogs or the savage abandon with which Justine devours her first shawarma from the bone. A pig cadaver on a gurney an anesthetized horse hanging by its hooves Alexia’s gloved arm diving into a cow’s anus. The vet school setting is ripe for symbolism, allowing Ducournau to make ample use of animals - both their bodies and their instincts. READ MORE: ‘Raw’ Filmmaker Julia Ducournau On The Bloody, Terrifying Challenge That Fueled Her Tasty New Genre Film When Alexia notices Justine’s hairy armpits, she asserts: “At your age, I already gave myself Brazilians.” Lying spread eagled before her older sister, the family dog sniffs between her legs before Alexia dives in with the wax. After retching up balls of her own hair in the bathroom, a classmate cheerfully suggests she use two fingers next time. Ducournau uses Justine’s interactions to show the ways in which girls teach each other how to feel about their bodies. Her only friend is her roommate, Adrien (Rabah Naït Oufella), whose unapologetic sexuality stands in stark contrast to Justine’s doe-eyed innocence. Justine is shocked to learn that Alexia has already discovered her taste for meat, and the sisters begin an epic dance that will test the limits of their blood bond. When she protests on vegetarian principle, Justine thinks she has found an ally in her older sister, Alexia (Ella Rumpf), also a student at the school. Once at school, the young newbie is abruptly whisked out of bed to a grotesque hazing ritual that finds all the freshmen doused in pig’s blood, and forced to down raw rabbit kidney. Meat pulls focus early on, when Justine spits out a greyish-brown ball of it from a bland gob of mashed potatoes. The film opens as Justine is dropped off at veterinarian school by her staunchly vegetarian parents. READ MORE: 6 Must-See French Films and Special Events From Rendez-Vous With French Cinema (Like the father of body horror, David Cronenberg.) Shrewdly using the art-horror format to upend the traditional teen Bildungsroman, “Raw” makes it impossible to look away - as much as you might want to. “ Raw” may start out like any other coming-of-age tale, but as soon as Justine (Garance Marillier) gets her first taste of meat, she’s transformed from good girl to social outcast, rejected by society for her carnal desires.ĭucournau tears down the walls of a genre so often identified with male filmmakers. Female sexuality carries the same taboo as a ravenous flesh-eating teenager in this provocative feature debut from French filmmaker Julia Ducournau.
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