Locarno Film Festival 2023 | La Morsure (Bitten)

A subtly disturbing atmosphere opens the first feature film by Romain de Saint-Blanquat, premiering at Locarno film festival on August 5th. With his latest short film Yaakikoone (2016), he had told the story of a nine-year-old boy, trying to fix a roof, and before that – with Pin Ups (2014) – he had focused on the afternoon of two teenagers. Apparently, youth is what impregnates the art of the French director, as La Morsure (Bitten) (2023) again delves into a day in the life of two young girls.

“Clockwise if I am to live, anticlockwise if I am to die”. It’s a spooky dream or maybe an omen which starts the early day of Françoise. But it’s not a normal day: It’s Ashes Wednesday 1967, and in the religious institute, where she studies and lives, it’s a very important one. The first day of Lent is a moment of repentance for all Catholics, during which they should adhere to prayer, fasting and abstinence, especially from meat. And on this date, which marks the beginning of preparation for Easter, the two high-school classmates Delphine and Françoise will be initiated to something that rather goes in the opposite direction: the experience of living life, instead of avoiding it.

This journey from the dawn of Wednesday to the dawn of Thursday takes the form of a baptism of flesh and fire: a physical trip that actually becomes deeply spiritual. In fact, it leads to self-discovery. But not only that. The darkness of the night brings to the surface fears that can only be conquered by embracing them and getting to their core. And dread is what the two girls constantly have to come to term with, in this almost magical coming of age.

  They have to overcome it in the first place when they decide to escape the convent and accept the secret invitation from that group of cute boys from the “outside” world. They left a note in the courtyard which had passed from pupil to pupil, from hand to hand among the church pews before reaching the protagonist. According to her dream, it may be the last day to live, so she wants to live it to the fullest. The pendant seems to agree.

  Like an amulet, the necklace is used by the young woman as a pendulum of infallible judgment that dictates her decisions just by its turning clockwise or not when left spinning. In the dream it had turned anticlockwise, and according to Françoise, this would sanction her imminent death. She has nothing to lose. So, it doesn’t take long to accept the pendant’s confirmation when it turns clockwise and decrees that they will find a way to go to the party. And this is where it all begins.

 They escape the prison-school. They accept a lift by a thief whose enigmatic and almost sacred presence is reminiscent of the protagonist of Teorema (1968) by PierPaolo Pasolini. He takes them to the location of the costume party: a decadent godforsaken villa in the middle of a forest. Here they both discover the first sexual drives, passions and sensation, including negative ones such as the violence they are at moments exposed to. But as they dance around, something disturbing creeps into Francoise’s mind and behaviors, as she meets a young boy disguised as a vampire.

In the end, life is about what you choose to believe in. And if you decide that vampires and nightmares can be real, then they are. They become true when someone makes them so. So does the protagonist, as she begins to slavishly follow the disturbing facts of her “premonitory” dream, making it forewarning herself. Things begin to happen just as she had (fore) seen them the previous night. Since she had seen herself as a new Joan of Arc surrounded by flames, the logical final action of her supposedly last hour would be to seek for fire and death. Therefore, on this night of the living dead and the dying living, Françoise sets herself the fire she feared she would be consumed by. She enacts her own virginal sacrifice on the altar, almost in a trance and as driven by an uncanny force, in the presence of the “vampire” boy. But there is still a grip on reality. This is represented by the friend Delphine, the Apollonian side of the duo. She will eventually drag her friend out of the Dionisyan delirium in which she has fallen.

It’s dawn. The dawn of the next day. The church is still on fire, but the girl is now safe, she didn’t die, saved by the positive force of Delphine. In a world where the line between dream and reality, night and day, nightmare and peace, is blurred, only love can save us. Ashes Wednesday is over, it’s time to go back, but not as before. The two girls have learned the most important lesson of their lives: that love always wins over death.

This debut feature succeeds in conveying – through the coming-of-age structure – a broader spiritual reflection that ranges from fate to free will. It doesn’t give answers or blatant statements. Maybe life is all chaos, maybe there’s a pattern. Maybe we can affect our future, maybe this is just an illusion. But the only certainty is that we should stop questioning it so much and simply live the day. Perhaps not as if it was the last we’re given, but for sure as if we didn’t care how many more there are to come. Tomorrow is tomorrow’s concern.

© 2020-2023. UniversalCinema Mag.