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GLASGOW 2021

Review: Out of This World

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- French director Marc Fouchard's violent sophomore film is steeped in clichés about art and madness

Review: Out of This World
Kévin Mischel in Out of This World

Inspiration: where does it come from? Is it something divine, or some mysterious consequence of our self’s encounter with the world, one which does not need explaining as much as it does expressing? In that sense, could it be a form of insanity?

Marc Fouchard takes this line of thinking to its logical, if regrettable, conclusion in his sophomore feature, Out of This World [+see also:
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, which played at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival. The film follows Léo (Kévin Mischel), a very quiet and shy young man working as a taxi driver, the kind of repetitive and silent job which allows him to stay in his head at his leisure while making just about enough money to get by. Because Léo is indeed more interested in his music than in people, who are more of a nuisance to him than anything else, especially when they ask him to turn the music down during their ride — his music, though they do not know that.

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Léo is a tortured Uber artist, and Fouchard clearly wants us viewers to sympathise with his plight. The whole film is assembled to put us into the headspace of this sombre loner: the sound design and editing follow his obsession with music, his moody electronic beats leading the way from car ride to car ride, client to client, day to night.

But already, the extremely serious tone of the whole enterprise is hard to get on board with: rather than genuinely atmospheric, the dark mood feels forced and even juvenile, associating creative expression with loneliness and inner turmoil in a tiresome, rather exasperating cliché.

The film only goes on to confirm its straightforward adherence to this old-fashioned vision of art and life when Léo finds himself mesmerised by one of his clients: a deaf young woman (Aurélia Poirier) who also happens to be a dancer. Deprived of our most usual tool for expression — speech — she is free, in Léo’s eyes, to use other, more artistic and less literal ones and to exist on a higher plane — out of this world, if you will. There is hope at first that this rather crass romanticisation of a disability as some kind of magical state of being might only be Léo’s and not shared by the film itself, but Fouchard does not seem able or willing to keep any real distance from his character and frames this relationship (doomed and unequal through no fault of her own, and not due to her being deaf) as a sad and unfortunate tragedy. Perhaps if a bigger budget had allowed Out of This World to embrace a more stylised visual approach, then this sombre fairy-tale idea would have been more convincing. As it is, the film’s frequent lapses into an inadvertently realist aesthetic only further highlight the ridicule of this self-pitying artist.

When he is revealed to also be a violent killer of women, Léo does not appear more mysterious, only more pathetic. His desire to extricate himself from the unkind and banal reality of his life goes so far as to push him to murder — what could be more life-denying than that? The fact that the vast majority of his victims are women is just another effect of the film's terribly outdated "romanticism”: women are beautiful images of grace, bringing the agonising artist closer to the kind of abstract beauty he is seeking through his music, and so he both wants them and hates them. His assaults on strangers are seen in brief snapshots of violence, scored by his droning, pulsating compositions, the film forging an explicit link between art, madness and violence.

Within Out of This World at times seems to be hiding a more engrossing, visceral film about a serial killer completely out of touch with reality. But Fouchard is too concerned with the rather unoriginal and tiresome “psychology” of his character (it’s all about the mother, of course), and in rationalising the madness of his hero, the director conveys a disappointingly simplistic and unconvincing black-and-white vision of the world where Léo’s emo sensibility is revealed as truth.

Out of This World was produced by France's Dacor Productions. Its international sales are handled by Reel Suspects.

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