Peau d'homme coeur de bête

while watching this film i often found myself repeating the title over and over again like some sort of mantra that would help me truly figure out its shadowed and concealed plot. after viewing i was left feeling perplexed and unrequited but intrigued but the goings on of a family clearly plagued by inherent violence and unusual treatment of their "fellow" human beings. i put the term fellow in quotation marks because of the unique perspective taken on human nature as a theme of the film as understood from the title. the line between human and animal is blurred and the matter of where our humanness divides from our animalness is never fully resolved.

intriguing film.

The earliest reviews in this list baffle me. While this film does deal with violence towards women (that's the whole point, really), it hardly "celebrates" it. Very little violence is actually shown on- screen, and much of it is male-on-male.

Threat is certainly present throughout the film. An oppressive sense of impending danger suffuses nearly every frame. We're made constantly aware that certain male characters are teetering on the brink, and that the women and girls around them are likely to suffer the consequences. This threat, once invoked, serves the film so well that very little on-screen violence is required to keep the audience in a state of anxious, horrified dread.

For example, we learn early on that a police officer is being sent on a forced vacation due to his drinking and unruly behavior. We also learn that his marital difficulties have resulted in his wife's hospitalization. When asked about an injury to his hand, he jokes about someone hitting herself on it. Though he's obviously beaten his wife into the hospital, we're not shown the incident as we would be in an exploitation film.

We later see the same character cavorting with two prostitutes in a brothel. The scene isn't at all violent, but we learn that the brothel owner is angry because the man has harmed one of his employees and "likes to make women bleed". Tellingly, this is seen primarily as a property crime by the odious brothel owner.

I can see why aggrieved antifeminists might object to the film's portrayal of masculine brutality, but the filmmakers hardly seem to endorse the horrors they depict. Nor do I read the final scene as a "hopeful" sign of better things to come. The closing scream is one of rage.

"Peau d'Homme Coeur de Bête" is a fairy tale in the classical sense. This isn't a Disney movie and we get the feeling that the children might be devoured at any moment. This tension runs throughout. Does this movie depict violence towards children? Not exactly. But the threat is real and ever-present. It saturates everything.

All of the men in this movie are struggling with their emotions and anger. After having left various male organizations (such as the military, the pseudo-military fraternity of cops and perhaps even prison) we see that these men don't know how to vent or focus their own aggression. It spills out. They lash out at those around them. When the men gather together this emotion tumbles from riot to celebration seemingly at random.

This is a dark portrait of "the heart of a beast" that beats within all men. In the end, however, there is a small sliver of hope. Perhaps it is possible, somehow, to vent this aggression in a non-destructive way.

Its the story of a guy who returns to his family after being gone for fifteen years. Then an hour later, he goes nuts and starts beating the crap out of everyone. He's the bad guy, I guess, but none of the characters are interesting or enlightening in any way. There's not much to this except watching this guy beat up all the females in the film for no reason. Pretty sick stuff really.

"Skin of Man, Heart of Beast" is a subtitled French flick which tells of a man who wanders back into the lives of his mother and brothers after a long absence he unconvincingly alleges to have spent in the Foreign Legion. A laconic and distant person, the film never really develops the character as it clumsily shows him becoming an increasingly aberrant "head case". A unfortunate attempt at dark psychodrama with low-end production value, this painfully tedious flick spends most of its time with the mundane activities of the family members making its 90%-filler/10%-thriller screenplay too little payoff for too much effort. Passable for all but the most diehard foreign film freaks into psychodramas in spite of above average critical reviews. (B-)