Film can represent the external and internal life of humanity in ways no other art form outside of maybe comic books. Films can attempt to mimic every day life and they can attempt to mimic the imagery of dreams. The two can exist both separate or together on the silver screen. The modern giallo horror film Knife+Heart uses both worlds. The film documents a gay culture that no longer exists. Writer and director Yann Gonzalez conveys through dreams the internal desires of the characters and their past. The combination of the two creates an otherworldly nightmare.
Gonzalez sets Knife+Heart in 1979 Paris. The AIDS epidemic is two years away and pornographic films still play in movie theaters years before the home video boom. The film starts off with scenes from a vaseline lensed, idyllic gay pornography film. The scene then cuts to a nightclub where one of the starts of the porn film, Karl, spots a man in a leather mask and leather jacket. It’s not an unusual fashion in a club full of scantily clad men and leather daddies but it’s a striking look in the cub. Intrigued, Karlgoes to the man. The two of them go to a room near the club to engage in sex. Karl, tied to the bed, simply expects something rough and enjoyable from his new partner. Instead this leather clad stranger brutally murders Karl with a black dildo that conceals a switchblade.
Elsewhere Karl’s producer, Anne Parèze, cries into a phone booth to her ex-girlfriend Lois, her film editor. Lois wants nothing to do with her but still cuts together Anne’s latest film. Anne is so busy shooting her current project that she barely notices Karl is gone. People come and go in her crew. The pieces of her life have left her despondent. A few days later, the police call her and question her about Karl. Instead of being horrified, Anne uses the experience and the murder as inspiration for her latest gay pornographic film, cleverly titled Homocidal. However as filming continues, more and more of her actors are murdered. Is it coincidence or is it related to the strange dreams Anne keeps having?
If the plot description didn’t clue you in already, this is an unabashedly gay and queer film. Writer and director Yann Gonzalez pulls no punches in depicting what goes on making a gay pornographic film or the lives of the people making it. The depictions of gay sex are about as graphic as you can get before a film becomes actual pornography. Only one straight character is present in the cast of the movie and even then, they’re okay with performing gay sex on camera for money. Maybe the only other straight people are the police officers who barely care about the deaths of gay men. Yet as shocking as this depiction of gay lifestyles may seem to the unprepared, it feels like a necessary corrective. By turning the generally heterosexual genre of the giallo (the Italian predecessor to the slasher film) into something explicitly homosexual and queer, Gonzalez brings something new to this genre. The penetrative act of murder in this film becomes an entirely new thing when the symbolically phallic object of a knife becomes a literal phallic object. When the killer is revealed as the victim of homophobia, the murder streak becomes as much an act of self hatred as it is an act of sexual conquest. He cannot stand to be who he is so he takes it out those who can be themselves freely.
Gonzalez also uses the medium of film to portray a culture at the last gasp of that specific point in the culture. It’s hard to think not about the AIDS Epidemic that’s two years away watching this movie. Here’s a group of homosexual men freely and unconcernedly having sex. Men go to porn theaters to hook up with strangers. Yet he also has no issue showing the commraderie among the queer community. When transgender sex workers show up at a party, they’re treated like heroes and immediately get offered parts in Homocidal. Gonzalez is aware of the portrayals of homosexual and queer people in giallo. They tend to be at best stereotypes, or at worst homphobic or transphobic. He allows the various homosexual, transgender, and queer people in his film to be complex and complicated individuals. Anne might be heroic for trying to uncover what’s happening to her crew but also she clearly exploits the situation by making movie like Homocidal.
Gonzalez and his cinematographer Simon Beaufils also use the style of the giallo genre to give this film a dream like quality. Giallo films generally have an expressive use of color. Here Beaufils fills scenes throughout them either entirely in blue or red, or both. There’s special attention paid throughout the film to Anne’s red boots. The black backgrounds aren’t so much shadows but voids of negative space. Dreams are reversed black and white film negatives. Even the fake porn films throughout the movie, have hazy qualities to them as if Anne and her crew came up with them from sexually lurid dreams. The murder sequences feel like the dark nightmare of the gay utopia of making the porn films. The nightmare of gay men being killed at any time indiscriminately is out there but at least there is the dream of this found family making these films.
In the end though the real and the dream world collide. This brings up the final revelation of the film. Throughout the film, Anne has these strange black and white dreams. They consist of two young men, someone set on fire, and a barn burning. Eventually it’s revealed that the killer was a young man whose father caught him with his male lover. The father killed the lover and set his son on fire. It’s the son who killed the actors in Anne’s productions. Why? Because he saw one of Anne’s earlier films that somehow depicted a version of his story. It’s likely Anne had these dreams and used them as the basis for the earlier. Still there’s no way that Anne could have witnessed this, unless she saw it as a child from afar and suppressed it. Giallo occasionally has supernatural elements so it’s not too far outside of the genre. However as the events of the murder inform the making of Homocidal, these dreams become the basis for another film.
Knife+Heart is an incredible addition to the recent run of giallo inspired films. The film is the dream of an older time but also a nightmare of its darker impulses. Yann Gonzalez captures a specific moment in time in French gay culture and some of thrill of living in that time. It is a film unafraid using both the real and the imagined to capture the sense of danger in being a queer person.
Cinema Dual 
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