UK Edition
Meet the woman behind Raw, the cannibal horror movie that left audiences fainting
Britain and Canada have much in common – a sovereign, publicly funded health care – but one key point on which the two countries differ is cannibalism. For Canadians, people eating people is a serious no-no. But the British, while we’re also broadly anti, tend to get less het up about it in public.
Take Raw, a film from France in which a young woman submits with growing gusto to her newfound taboo appetites. At its premiere in Toronto, someone had to be carted out of the cinema on a stretcher. Audience members fainted, paramedics were scrambled, photographs of an ambulance were tweeted. But at its first UK showing the following month, its director, Julia Ducournau, wondered if something had gone wrong.
“After a few screenings you have some markers in your head of where and how people are going to react,” the 33-year-old says from Belgium. “Where they’re going to laugh, where they’re going to squirm in their seats. But in Britain there was no reaction in the room. Like, none.”
Halfway through, she ducked out of the cinema with Robert Walak, the president of the film distribution company Focus Features, and asked him what he thought the problem might be. The London-based executive had to explain that when British people enjoy a film, they keep quiet, sit still and pay attention. Reassured, she slipped back in, and says she could sense the “concentration in the room”, before adding that the clues she’d missed were that “no one was looking at their phones and no one was eating”.
To be fair, anyone who finds their stomach rumbling during Raw may be in need of urgent psychiatric attention. The film isn’t a gore-bespangled ordeal like Saw or Hostel – “after 10 years of torture porn, I kind of feel ‘OK, I’ve seen it all’,” says Ducournau – but a startlingly accomplished directorial debut that twists your mind and insides like marshmallow flumps. Some of it is extraordinarily hard to watch – I’ll admit at more than a few points it made me feel a little Canadian – but it’s pulled off with a throat-gripping virtuosity that just won’t let you look away. The film tells the story of Justine (Garance Marillier), a bright but timid vegetarian teen who takes up a long-sought-after place at veterinary college, where the bizarre inauguration rituals – she and her classmates are doused in animal blood and forced to eat raw rabbit liver – kindle a sexual awakening and a connected, overpowering hunger for human flesh.
On the phone, Ducournau is funny and forthright, with a dry sense of humour: when I ask if she shot Raw in a real vet school, she swallows a laugh and explains that yes she did, because that way she didn’t have to bring all the animals with her. (The location – and you’ll want to know, because it’s stunning – is the tree-shrouded Brutalist campus of the University of Liège in Belgium.) She’s also breezily chic in that not-even-trying way that Parisians, and absolutely nobody else, can pull off. I remember seeing her surrounded by cameras on the terrace of the Palais at the Cannes Film Festival last year and assuming she was a French actress-stroke-style-icon of the moment, before a friend pointed out she was the director of “the feminist cannibal film”.
That’s as reasonable a boiling-down of Raw as you could probably hope for, though it doesn’t quite capture the intestinal tangle of moods and emotions the film plunges its audience into. It’s as funny and sad as it is provocative, and Ducournau says that when she began the search for a budget six years ago, it was her tonal swerves, rather than graphic imagery, that made financiers blanch.
She laments the loss of that no-holds-barred quality in French cinema – “Godard used to do it, but somehow we’ve since forgotten it’s possible” – and cites Britain’s own Ben Wheatley as a modern-day master of the form. “When I watch Kill List, I’m constantly questioning myself,” she says of the notoriously unsettling thriller in which a soldier-turned-hitman on one last job becomes the ashen-faced pawn of a mysterious sect. “It’s like, ‘What am I watching right now?’ And I love that. It’s like riding a roller -coaster and not knowing when the next loop will come. It makes you feel incredibly full at the end – full and alive.”
She also recognises flesh as a feminist issue. Many of the film-makers who have tackled cannibalism in the past 20 years have been women – Claire Denis in Trouble Every Day, Antonia Bird in Ravenous, Marina de Van in In My Skin – and Ducournau believes that’s no accident.
“These films are fundamentally about the opening of the skin,” she says. “And because women’s skin is what outside looks fall on, it can be glamorised or sexualised in ways that are out of our control. So we find it doesn’t belong to us. And that makes us want to tear it up.”
Ducournau has been scratching below the surface since childhood. Her parents are a dermatologist and a gynaecologist, which probably explains a lot, but also keen cinephiles who instilled a love of film in their daughter that eventually led her to La Fémis, the French state film school, from which she graduated in 2008. Her first short film, Junior, focused on a 13-year-old tomboy (played by Raw’s Marillier) who undergoes a monstrous transformation; next came Eat, a black comedy about bulimia for French television.
Between childhood trips to the repertory cinemas around the French capital, Ducournau remembers poring over the anatomy textbooks piled up around their Paris home. One set of photographs made a particular impact: “They were of a boy who had lost his ear, I think due to leprosy, and doctors had reattached it with leeches.”
Perhaps the spirit of that detached ear made its way into Raw in the form of the severed finger that provides Justine with her first taste of human meat. (The prop was made from melted fruit gums, but doesn’t look like it.)
Ducournau chose a finger for this pivotal moment, rather than, say, a hip or thigh, “because it’s a body part you already know well. You know where the bone goes, you know there’s a nail on there.” That’s what makes the scene so much more disturbing than a full-on, blood-drenched dismemberment: it makes you imagine what it might be like to take a bite yourself.
“I had the tools to make it a gore-fest, and I could have done it, but I wasn’t interested,” she says. “When you tackle the taboos of humanity it’s because you want to talk about humanity. I’m not trying to play a trick on people.”