This year (2015) the French Canadian director Jean Marc-Vallée made
Demolition, a Hollywood movie featuring a tortured soul who starts to dismantle
appliances and later buildings to work through his emotional crises. 43 years
ago the French director Claude Faraldo directed Themroc, a movie where a
tortured soul has a bad day at work, comes home, turns his entire front room
into a cave, shacks up with his sister and eats a policeman. Two films, two
building sites. Come on, which one would you rather see?
Themroc is a dark but hugely funny howl of rage against
oppression, the strictures of work and everything that prevents man from being
primal and free. Made five years after
the Paris riots of 1968, there’s more than a whiff of anarchy and Situationist
politics in the air as we follow Themroc: preparing for and on his journey to
work; his sacking (because he witnessed his boss and secretary fooling around);
and his subsequent orgy of destruction after he returns to his flat, grabs his
just-clothed sister and walls up the living room door, before creating a cave
mouth where the back wall used to be.
I’ve seen this film a number of times over the years. My
first viewing, as a teenager, admittedly left me rather cold – it seemed that
director Faraldo just wanted to shock with his scenes of incest and cannibalism
– don’t worry, you’re spared most of the detail. But watching it some years
later, and again recently - with the benefit of at least one mid-life crisis
behind me - I appreciated not only Michel Piccoli’s superhuman performance
(literally – watch for the scenes where he takes a loaded wheelbarrow upstairs
and moves a car with his bare hands) but also a brilliantly nuanced one.
Communicating without language - his vocabulary consisting of a series of
increasingly guttural snarls, howls and grunts (his fellow actors just speak
gibberish, save for a few words of French) - Themroc is a bewildered stranger
in his own broken part of France, trying to make sense of his own feelings and escape
his dull existence.
Praise also for the supporting cast: Jeanne Heviale, who
plays Themroc’s mother, is excellent, her face portraying a constant mask of
disappointment whatever her son does, whether being late for work or throwing
the best cutlery out of his newly formed cave mouth. Also Beatrice Romand as his sister, who turns
in an extraordinarily sensual performance amid the distinctly un-erotic ruins
of Themroc’s flat.
Themroc is a film which in its own desire not to be taken
seriously becomes the perfect vehicle for the Situationist concept of
non-competitive play being the one thing that is truly liberating for the self.
Themroc’s cave and actions are the inverse of the walled in flat-dwellers
around him, and he emerges as the hero of the piece despite his apparent madness:
he’s a tenement - and rather pervy - King Lear.
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