Knife + Heart
Un couteau dans le coeur
“When did you first realize you liked girls?”
Oddly, it was the first time anyone had ever asked me that question. Only my closest friends know that I’m not straight (and now, everyone reading this haha).
I remembered the poem I wrote at age 11, “The Girl Across the Street,” where the narrator’s heart breaks after they witness the titular girl kiss someone else. The poem was published in our local paper, accompanied by a cartoon rendering of a boy with green hair and sunglasses writing in a notebook. They thought I was a boy. I was delighted. I wouldn’t say that I knew I was queer then, but I already knew I loved subverting expectations, breaking the rigid molds of acceptable behavior for young women.
I’m in a heterosexual marriage; most of my ex-lovers are men. I’ve never had any desire to label myself, to declare anything. The first time I kissed a girl, it felt like discovery, opening a hidden chamber inside myself that had been there all along. Now, when I desire another woman, it’s the same feeling. An unearthing, yet entirely new. Terra incognita. Maybe it’s the freedom that’s so exciting: throwing off all the tired hetero narratives like an ill-fitting garment, finally getting that giant dick that seems to always hover in the air above me like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon out of the room.
June is LGBTQ+ Pride month, and with all the doom looming over us this year it feels especially important to celebrate. I want to reclaim my sexuality, its many facets. Its indefinability. I want to celebrate all my friends who are pursuing happiness in ways both radical and ordinary.
(And in this political climate, the ordinary, just surviving as an LGBTQ+ person, maintaining your humanity and your joy, has become radical.)
After watching and reviewing The Doom Generation last month, I’ve been craving more audacious queer films. Films that shock and awe, that give me an entirely new lens through which to view the world. Queer horror films/books and road trip novels/movies top my list of media to consume this summer. I began with Un Couteau Dans Le Coeur (2018), a queer meta-horror film co-written and directed by Yann Gonzalez.
There was no light bulb moment when I realized I was queer. It was a slow creeping tide, an accumulation of attractions that didn’t fit the conventions of a straight, monogamous partnership. And why does every connection, every relationship have to labeled anyway, have to fit some kind of mold, when real human connection (whether friendship, romance, sex, creative enmeshment, friction etc. etc. or any combination of those) is messy, chaotic, beautiful….?
Gory, even, as in Un Couteau Dans Le Coeur: a neon-soaked, hyper color-saturated, extremely bloody ode to gay porn and giallo films where sex and death, love and violence are inseparable.
Knife + Heart, exactly as you would expect from a gay, French slasher flick, serves up equal heapings of blood, cum and melancholy. But, like many of my favorite pieces of art, it resists being defined or summed up as any one genre. (I always aspire to genre-fluidity in my own art and writing).
A charcoal-black comedy. A potent mix of porn, performance art, B-movies, pop art, romantic drama. This uniquely French, uniquely queer mash-up works thanks to the strength of its performances and its breathtaking dream/nightmare cinematography despite a sometimes-confusing plot.
I’m easily distracted; I like a film to not so much watch as wander through, a house with many rooms. Films I really love and find aesthetically inspirational I will watch several times in a row, keep them on in the background for a week of evenings, submerging my subconscious in their images and moods. I did this with Un Couteau Dans Le Coeur. Explicit sex mixed with murder (all the killings in the film start as sex acts), buckets of blood, club and bar scenes suffused with moody neon blues, reds, pinks, drag queens, Vanessa Paradis in a dark green raincoat and red leather thigh-high boots, eye makeup streaming down her face….all matched my internal weather. I guess on the inside I’m a grimy, rainy alley in 1979 Paris.
Horror provides a unique language to explore painful truths about living as an LGTBQ+ person. The specter of the coming AIDS crisis hangs over the film- the murder weapon, a dildo with a knife concealed inside, is a brutal metaphor, a perfectly camp entwinement of sex and death. Our heroine (of sorts) is Anne (Vanessa Paradis)- a lesbian producer of gay porn, a hard-drinking, amoral artist heartbroken after the breakup of her relationship with her editor, Lois. Paradis is luminous and disturbing as a woman so unhinged in love that she follows Lois through a parking lot screaming “You can’t refuse a love like this! You must love me!”
Lois still has feelings for her ex but is terrified of the monster Anne has become. Even after Anne’s stars begin turning up horrifically murdered, she believes that if she crafts an inspired enough film, she will win Lois back. As the police dismiss the murders, and the bodies pile up, Anne continues to follow her inspiration. Blurring the line between art and life, the porn flick that Anne and her team are shooting (Homocidal) mirrors the murder investigation, with her gay best friend and co-producer Archibald (Nicolas Maury) playing her, wearing her iconic green raincoat, hair the same shade of blonde, eyes made up in her signature style (heavily blue). In a wonderfully bizarre scene, Anne films her doppelganger’s appearance at the police station, but the interrogation soon devolves into both the detectives and the witness humping the table between them with wild abandon.
Doppelgangers appear throughout the film. In one stunning pastoral scene, after the company’s picnic is broken up by a storm, Anne and Lois embrace beneath a tree, both wearing white shirts, branches and blonde hair writhing wildly in the wind. Lois breaks from Anne’s arms, and in the next scene between the two, she wears a black shirt as she runs away in horror from the increasingly aggressive Anne. The pastoral picnic scene ends in the murder of yet another of Anne’s friends/former stars at the hands of the masked murderer. The many doppelgangers in Knife +Heart point to the complexity of queer relationships (and friendships), where sometimes the feelings of wanting to touch someone and wanting to be them, to know what it’s like to exist inside their skin, mingle.
In Knife + Heart, suppressed sexual appetites are deadly. The masked murderer is a kind of gay Freddy Krueger, deeply wounded emotionally and physically and acting out his repressed desires through brutal violence. As writer Anton Bitel wrote of the film for Little White Lies, this “piece of neon camp… plunges unexpectedly into deepest melancholy… an exploration of the way that film – that most voyeuristic and fetishistic of art forms – triggers our unconscious memories and captures our innermost dreams and desires.” * Un couteau dans le coeur is a film for film lovers, those that enjoying diving deeply into the subconscious realms of nightmare and longing.
4 out of 5 skulls
💀💀💀💀
If you enjoyed this, consider giving me a tip to help support my writing!
There's a quiet ache in this--how flying and landing mirror the tension of being together and apart. The sky becomes a tender paradox, holding both miracle and melancholy. A beautiful, existential flutter between presence and absence.
Lovely, Adriane!