In 1999, two very different horror films were unleashed onto audiences. Both were postmodern takes on contemporary folklore. Both involved young people getting lost in the woods. Both drew heavily from folktales by the Brothers Grimm. Both were products of their time and thus reflect their respective society's anxieties. Both have notoriously bleak endings. Both were far cries from what the multiplexes were offering. Both were influential in spawning two new modes of storytelling. Yet The Blair Witch Project was heavily marketed as a horror film and remains a landmark in the found footage genre while Criminal Lovers stayed mostly in arthouse theaters due to its frank sexuality as well as its refusal to stay within genre conventions. As a result, Criminal Lovers never got proper attention that it deserves in forming French New Extermity's roots.
Honestly, the film feels what would happen if you spliced in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre halfway through Badlands. This isn't the only cinematic influence that Criminal Lovers borrows from to tell its certified messed-up tale of doomed lovers running from the law. Echoes of The Night Of The Hunter and Salo are present in the film as the couple go down a river in a boat before being captured by a sadistic man in the woods. Every torturous taboo imaginable is broken to the point that you realize that Hansel and Gretel got off easy compared to what Alice and Luc suffer through.
That's where the film's strengths lie in its willingness to play with genre conventions and to break the boundaries of good taste. One minute, it's a high school melodrama with murder thrown in for good measure; the next minute, it's a subliminal torture porn that would make Eli Roth run away in complete terror. I won't spoil the horrors but they gave this hardened viewer pause in disbelief.
This gives Criminal Lovers a much more transgressive artistry than Blair Witch Project ever could- it's a fractured fairy tale as envisioned by a hellish-but-dreamlike collaboration between the Marquis De Sade and Jean-Luc Godard. Even better, you get two fantastic performances from both Natacha Regnier and Jeremie Renier that supply the film with a desperate rawness that's only matched by the young people suffering in Larry Clark's films.
