LES REVENANTS
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A creative and intelligent recycling of
the dead returning for non-horror purposes, but
it runs into pacing problems toward the middle.
Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
This film is a sort of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD without the horror
premise. One day everybody who died in the previous ten years or
so comes back to life. In a George Romero horror film the zombies
want to eat the living and the premise is used for horror. In
this film the dead have come back a little slower and not as
bright as they were, but notably no more malicious than they were
in life.
So all these dead people have returned. Now what? Who is going
to feed and care for them? Can their small economy give them
jobs? Will they be putting the living out of work? What problems
are there in integrating them back into society? Do the dead feel
oppressed by the living? Do the living feel endangered by the
dead? Certainly not the issues that George Romero faces. They
have to be treated like refugees with living accommodations. Some
go back to live with their families, some do not, and we see the
reasons why. On the whole it is more the living who have
unfinished business with the dead.
This could have been a zombie film with intelligence instead of
horror. It very nearly is. Co-writer and director Robin Campillo
does not handle the film as well as it might have been. Part of
his point is that the dead are slow and a little dazed, but in
this film the living also become slow and a little dazed. This
leads to slow and introspective conversations between the living
and the dead punctuated with meaningful stares and spoken in
disjoint four-word phrases with long pauses. (That does make the
subtitles easier to read.) The film then takes on a lethargic
pacing and tone. In the final reel the pace picks up a little,
but also betrays the spirit of the film to that point, much in the
way Tod Browning's FREAKS did.
Sidenote: There seem to be obvious problems with the film. When
we first see the dead they are marching from their graves in a
mass exodus, wearing casual clothing like sun dresses. Are people
really buried this way in France? I doubt it. For that matter
many of these people would have long since decomposed. This has
to be seen as a pure fantasy with most logic questions delegated
to a willing suspension of disbelief. The mechanism is not as
important as what is done with the ideas. This film is more an
interesting failure than great use of a very different idea.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Copyright 2004 Mark R. Leeper
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38754 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1324803 X-RT-TitleID: 10004573 X-RT-AuthorID: 1309 X-RT-RatingText: 6/10
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