Julia Ducournau on coming-of-age cannibalism drama Raw
Raw has been described as a contemporary Suspiria meets Ginger Snaps, yet that impressive comparison somehow still doesn't do justice to French director Julia Ducournau's definitely self-assured, gripping debut
Intelligent, cinematic and brutal, the fully fleshed-out Raw stormed the competition at London Film Festival to win the First Feature Prize. Like any horror movie worth its salt, Raw's bone crunching, unrelenting Gallic gore caused paramedics to rush to its premiere, with viewers vomiting and fainting in the aisles at cannibal Justine (first time lead Garance Marillier)'s powerful, visceral performance, which sees her transform from scrawny, virginal innocent to bloody mouthed, literal man-eater incarnate.
An idealistic vegetarian, 16-year-old Justine is following in her elder sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf)'s footsteps by enrolling at veterinary school. During Justine’s gruelling “rookie” week of hazing and hedonistic partying, she's forced to eat a rabbit kidney, which results in an insatiable hunger for raw flesh rousing in her gut. Ducournau also wrote the screenplay – a female-focused coming-of-age story in all its bloody, gruesome glory – and balks at the idea of her film not being feminist, insisting on the importance of strong young women on screen in horror.
"My movie definitely is feminist, but who isn’t? How can you not be? This is the thing: it’s always seen as something miraculous or completely strange but I am a woman and it’s about women so of course it’s feminist. It would not be feminist to show [women] in cages and have the audience enjoying it." Ducournau is here referencing a wider problem of misogyny in horror narratives in general, but particularly within the wave of French New Extremism, where films like Martyrs and Frontiere(s) heavily featured the torture of female bodies. "To be honest, as a general genre, I am not crazy about torture porn. I can watch it but, for me, it hits a wall at some point where I lose interest. [Raw] wasn't directly aimed just at French torture porn. It was more of a general 'fuck you!' to be honest.
"It’s about not shaming the bodies of women, not shaming the sexuality of women, and it’s very important for me to have that depiction of strong women who don’t let themselves be beaten down by society. They look at themselves in the mirror, and I love the scene in the mirror when Justine dances because she's proud and she's fierce and she's not like, 'Oh my God, I look fat!' So it was very important to me to show that in the film."
The scene in question is one of many that shows ex-ballerina and pianist's Ducournau's affinity for choreography and physicality, which gives both a naturalism and cinematic depth to Raw's cannibal narrative, which would be outlandish in lesser hands. This physicality is perhaps best shown in Adrien, Justine's roommate, a pitch-perfect performance from Rabah Nait Oufella, whose vulnerability is cloaked in machismo. Adrien is gay, black and working class, an identity often invisible in both French and Hollywood cinema.
"Adrien is a character I knew already," says Docournau. "He was part of me. I knew he was going to be a good man and that their relationship was not going to be defined. I really loved Adrien and Justine's relationship. For me, it was one of the easiest things to write during the process. I didn't want to say 'this is like this' and 'this is like that', that they are lovers, they are boyfriend-girlfriend. They are everything! It's just her and him and this is what counts. It somehow helps the audience when we are in their bubble to understand them, and to get outside of this hazing and campus culture. It's just their own world and it's their own rules."
The Veterinary School's campus and collegiate, with its intensive hazing week of systemic bullying, violence and rape culture, functions as a heightened societal microcosm, making Raw a complex, subtextual, social satire as biting as its cannibalistic heroine. When Justine and a random boy are painted separately with blue and yellow paint, put in a toilet and told by their hazing "elders" not to come out until they're green, socially enforced sexual rituals are a laughing matter. Her fellow students aren't horrified by Justine's apparent lack of consent, but by her response: biting a chunk out of her initially excited, now terrified, would-be sexual partner. "You can have sex, but just how we intended," Ducournau explains of Justine's violent resistance.
Justine's struggle to come to terms with her cannibalism also echoes as an allegory for eating disorders. She raids the fridge at night for raw chicken, insatiably consuming as much bloody meat as possible before vomiting in the daytime, either when her body jettisons normal food or she is desperately trying to hold on to her former identity and reject her baser urges. Again, Ducournau explains this is not something she intentionally wanted to write into Justine's character but something she noticed on reflection.
"It's funny, there are two points in the movie that mention anorexia too," explains Ducournau. "There is Adrien talking about monkeys, that he's not going to be anorexic, and then Alexia says her sister Justine looks bad: 'Are you going to become anorexic?' I actually had no awareness of writing that before I saw it on screen. So it's a bit unconscious, it's subconscious but it does go with [the theme of] shaming bodies and the struggles of women today that they have with their own image. It's not exactly about eating disorders at all, I have a more general interest about the body then just this, but it must have subconsciously been in my mind because I really wanted to see a young girl who was not the prey of this terrible hazing that society does to women."
Ultimately, Raw's success when stripped down to its bare bones is due to Ducournau's control of the character study and her care for its characters – cannibals or otherwise. This is exemplified by the tender way in which she talks about her main protagonist. "Justine, she crosses a bridge too far sometimes," she says. "This is where, for me, her morality is more at stake, especially with the sex scenes, I wanted to build up tension. Is she going to become so overwhelmed by her needs and terrible nature that she's going to hurt the person she loves the most? In the end, at the last minute, she remembers herself. She's a moral being and she would never hurt the people that she loves."
Raw is released 7 Apr by Universal
Follow Rachel Bowles on Twitter at @hyperfemme