Director Xavier Gens on The Divide

The title of Frontier(s) director Xavier Gens’ latest film, The Divide, describes exactly what the film does to its audiences. Before its UK premiere at last year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, the film played to a packed press screening in the Filmhouse’s modest Cinema 2. It was standing room only at the film's opening, which sees eight good-looking, latte quaffing New Yorkers (including Lauren German, Milo Ventimiglia and Rosanna Arquette) escape an unexplained city-wide explosion by congregating in their apartment building’s fortified basement. By its closing credits, the auditorium had thinned out as much as the band of survivors hairdos do after radiation seeps into the basement turning the survivors into feral killers. One reviewer was so disgusted with the violence and sexual humiliation that Arquette's single mother character receives that she opted to burst out of the cinema’s fire escape, blinding her fellow critics with midmorning daylight, rather than spend a single second longer with Gens’ toxic vision.

The Divide is, admittedly, rather nasty, in a grisly, old school grindhouse kind-of-way, but there are seams of dark humour and political subtext that make Gens' film more than the sum of its clichéd B movie parts. I spoke to the cheery, quick-to-laugh Frenchman about his movie’s subversive streak after the film's public screening. “We set up a lot of situations we have already seen in movies before,” Gens tells me in a gentle tone that’s at odds with his in-your-face filmmaking style, “and I thought, okay, let’s work with the actors and try to find a way to change things and have character evolutions that seem unexpected.”

By assembling actors who have become somewhat typecast, such as movie veteran Michael Biehn, once Hollywood’s go-to grizzled action man, and Ventimiglia, best known as the goody two-shoes lead in TV series Heroes, Gens uses their career baggage to his advantage, messing with moviegoers expectations, encouraging them to second guess the character arcs of the film’s protagonists. He also shot the film in sequence and put his actors on a strict diet, which lends their suffering an air of believability despite some overripe performances. “I wanted [the actors] to really feel starved during the film,” says Gens with a mischievous grin. “It’s a really tricky thing to do – to act like you’re starving. It’s a much more physical feeling, so it was really important for me that the actors felt starved and didn’t have to think about it.”

Perhaps because of starvation, or radiation, or simply because of some innate malevolence that bubbles to the surface of people who are faced with a crisis, the characters begin to turn on one another, fighting for control of the food supply and physically, mentally and sexually abusing the weakest members of the group. It's a potent and poisonous portrait of humankind's potential for inhumanity. “It’s my point-of-view,” the director tells me when questioned about his nihilistic vision. “If you look at the men trapped in the Chilean mine, for example, they reacted pretty well in a similar situation; they got rescued without eating each other or anything, so it’s an extreme situation. All I want to do is show how humanity can reproduce the same things all the time. For me Milo Ventimiglia and Michael Eklund's characters really become fascists in that contained environment.”

The film is, as Gens explains, his way of exorcising the demons that he feels blight his home country. “There are things that are wrong in French society, like how the extreme right were very strong in the 2002 presidential elections. That was something which really shocked a lot of people of my generation. It’s important to challenge things like that in whatever way we can.”

When asked if he’s experienced any of these fascistic attitudes first-hand in terms of censorship, Gens gives a hearty chuckle. “My American distributors actually want me to do an extended cut; they want a more violent movie! The violence is much more psychological than physical, there’s not too much blood, really – it’s not a movie that’s there to provoke.” For Gens, the film is closer to a kind of purgatory, where the audience gets a glimpse of humanity at its most debased, its most fragile. Watching it becomes a form of catharsis. “After the movie you feel better,” he laughs, “you don’t want to kill people.”