Hey folks, Harry here and this is a captivating sounding Zombie movie. One that drops the horror aspect altogether, in exchange for the larger social problem of... what if the dead came back and wanted their jobs, apartment, car, lives back. They're dead, they're room temp, but they find your girlfriend hot! This sounds great, can't wait to see this. Here's that infectious flirter, Sheldrake with the story...
LES REVENANTS
THEY CAME BACK
March 17th 2005
New York
2005
French
directed and written by Robin Campillo
Sheldrake here, reporting live from midtown in New York City. The Film Society of Lincoln Center at 66th and Broadway, and the Museum of Modern Art at 53rd Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues, is running its New Directors / New Films series from March 23rd through April 3rd. Go to the FILM SOCIETY’S site (www.filmlinc.org) or MOMA’s site (www.moma.org) to see the schedules. The programs feature new cinema by directors who’re screening their flickering light and shadow shows for the first time (or close), and much of what I’m seeing is just plain brilliant.
And, for the record, Sheldrake got so obsessed with the movies he made a vital error on the organizational credits: ALL the intros for these pictures should note that THE FILM SOCIETY AT LINCOLN CENTER and MOMA together have sponsored this series and provided venues. For example, we saw JUNEBUG at the wonderful 1200 seat Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and I saw THEY CAME BACK, the French Zombie movie (j’prendes des cerveaux! j’prendes des cerveaux!) at the Walter Reade theater right across the plaza from the Metropolitan Opera House and the New York State Theater, home of the New York City Ballet.
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LES REVENANTS, or THEY CAME BACK begins with the image of the dead shuffling out of the cemeteries. They're casually, yet smartly, dressed; they're moving like, well, yeah, ok, sure, like zombies; and yet they are curiously indifferent to all the tasty brain—candy wandering around in such juicy live containers. In fact, they don't eat brains. In fact, they’re not that much different from the non-Undead, though I suppose that they ARE Undead makes them as different as they need to be. They’re just a little slower, and sleepier, as if they were just waking up. They don’t seem to be completely internally motivated, its more like they’re all bluetoothed together, but not in a threatening Borg way. In any event they are Back Among Us and they need a room to sleep in. And a job. And a life. Preferably their old room, and their old job, and their old life. And there’s your story. Half the film is about the way the culture deals with large numbers of the dead returning, and the other half deals with how, one on one, you deal with someone you've buried and mourned coming back and looking for a quick shag – you're in the ground a long, long time, after all, and talk about a second chance--and salaried wages.
See, trouble is, the rest of us have moved on since the timely demise of those who’ve now risen, and the untimely appearance of these refugees from Death has set the societal teeth on edge. Here’s the timely question the movie dares to ask: what would we do, both as a society and individually, if, one day, the cemeteries opened up for two hours and the dead came back. Not all of the dead, mind you, just about 70 million of the people who died in the last ten years. But why these 70 million people. Why now? And who asked them?
Think about it. You’ve buried a loved one—your mother, your father, a child—and they come back. Would you welcome with them with open arms? What if they were standing on the other side of that door, and you knew they were behind it. Would you open that door and embrace them? Or would you call a cop, a doctor and a priest? Remember, you’ve seen a LOT of zombie movies, and, oh by the way, last time you looked THEY WERE DEAD. And, seriously, you’ve been through the mourning process, you’ve buried them physically and mentally. And now—surprise!—everything you assumed about their being gone forever has been changed. It’s like when digital replaced analog. Erased doesn’t necessarily mean totally erased.
Back to those questions: the movie won’t give you easy answers to any of them. Instead, we simply deal, one at a time, with the different problems and contingencies the situation presents, even as the situation develops. Think about how little we know about, for example, you. One day you appeared on this earth. Great. Good for you. Welcome. Now you have to be fed, clothed, educated, housed. Where did you come from? Why are you here? Does it really matter? Your day to day needs still must be addressed, because you ARE here. The whys and wheretofores can come later, or never, and it changes nothing.
One thing you can take away from this movie is this: what do people do when they’re faced with the impossible, with something that makes your mind go blank with irrationality? Well, I live in New York City, and I was here in September 2001. What you do is mouth reassuring words, organize the workers, call on the city agencies, clear away the debris and feed and house the workers. Ordinary stuff. Besides being effective, it keeps you from going insane.
This works on a societal level, to a point—did the U.S. have the equivalent of a mental breakdown after 9/11? I leave it for you to judge. Certainly, many individuals had such breakdowns, and the stress levels for those picking up where they left off with the deceased in THEY CAME BACK are red-lining off the scale. For example, in the movie there’s a man and his wife and Little Dead Junior, and LDJ isn’t all warm and cuddly like he used to be, ‘cause after the warm and cuddly phase he went through a real dead phase. Then there’s the mayor of the town and his wife, the formerly dead Mrs. Mayor, and she’s jumpin’ around all alive and stuff, except she keeps trying to run away so she can be Free to be Dead. Then there’s the Dead Young Man and his Live-in, as in livin’, girlfriend—the central personal story of the film. He’s dead as Julius Caesar, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have a good time together, s’long as they both stay cool about it. You cool with that baby? Baby I’m so cool I’m cold, know what I’m sayin’?
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You think you know the dead, you think j’comprende the departed. You know nothing. The dead, as OUR TOWN has taught American high school students across the generations, have their own agenda that is neither monstrous nor human. These dead in THEY CAME BACK are just as talkative as ThorntonWilder’s, they don't sleep and some of their body measurements are a little off – Captain, there's something funny about these readings, his bioteknometric readings are a microbabble off, but I guess my instruments just need to be recalibrated. Yeah, that's it, it's your instruments. It's not that your subject should be room temperature and instead he's ordering Chicken Tikka Kabob takeout on your cell phone and hitting on your trophy wife. It's your instruments.
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Like SHAUN OF THE DEAD, THEY CAME BACK is a great entertainment, a really fine movie: it’s also a self-conscious deconstruction of zombie films, but not only zombie films: the narrative style is heavily influenced by Truffaut, in particular THE WILD CHILD and TWO ENGLISH WOMEN. Speaking to the director, I told him that the interesting thing about his movie was that it would go equally well on a double bill with either SHAUN OF THE DEAD or François Truffaut’s THE GREEN ROOM, a movie that’s equally obsessed with practical responses to the problems presented by the dead. His fascinating response was that while, yes indeed, François Truffaut had influenced his style, it was FARENHEIT 451 that had been on his mind while he’d made the film, because of its balancing of public and private responses to a difficult social issue. He also believes we’re very much living now in the world that Truffaut depicted in the film. One generation’s nightmare is another’s day-trip to Wal-Mart.
I can see another movie lurking in the background, the best comedy of the 1990s, in my opinion, GROUNDHOG DAY. In that movie, one man’s self-absorption is so great it creates a kind of dangerous black hole around himself that the universe that has to be corrected before any of us can move on to tomorrow. We never get any explanation for why Phil Connors is stuck in time, but we know he needs to learn a lesson before he can move on with his life, because in fact he isn’t changing or growing, he’s living one narcissistic day after the other, each one exactly like the last. In this movie, similar reasoning drives the raison d’aitre for the return of the dead: the world has shifted itself in a way to heal the living, something you’ll find out more about if you see the movie. Don’t let this last remark throw you: THEY CAME BACK is still on some level a chilling, in places weird and scary movie, but it also transcends the genre, as GD transcended post-SNL Bill Murray comedy.
After the screening I heard some complaints that the movie didn't seem to be internally coherent in terms of the rules of its undead universe, and the director noted that there are many questions about the reanimated that the movie doesn't answer. To my thinking, not adhering to any arbitrary set of rules left the movie free to roam over the personal and social aspects of the story in a more interesting and entertaining way than it would been able to do from inside the straitjacket of logic. Nabokov famously remarked that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and that applies to this movie: if it were perfectly consistent internally, it wouldn’t be one whit better or worse.
One final remark – I saw this film on Easter Sunday. LES REVENANTS, indeed.
