Carne

Gaspar Noé's first long work, at forty minutes, and it assembles the entire language of his later films. At the centre is a horse butcher, never named. His wife left and he raised his daughter alone; she does not speak and she is his whole world. When she reaches puberty he sees blood on her one morning, decides she has been attacked, finds the wrong man and assaults him. He goes to prison. The form is hard: abrupt cuts, noises used like gunshots, text thrown across the frame in large letters, and the character's interior voice. Noé kept these instruments in everything that followed. It opens with footage of a real slaughterhouse, presented as a warning. Philippe Nahon plays the butcher. Noé continued the same character in Seul contre tous in 1998; the two films are one story. Before you watch, know this: it contains real animal slaughter, implications of sexual violence and heavy violence generally. It is short and intends to be unpleasant, and succeeds; for a viewer with no interest in Noé's cinema there is no reason to be here.