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Les Revenants [AKA They Came Back]
The French: They Know Creepy
2005
Review: January 12, 2006
Director: Robin Campillo
Starring: Géraldine Pailhas, Jonathan Zaccaï, Frédéric Pierrot, Victor Garrivier, Catherine Samie
Oh yeah.
THE SETUP:
The recent dead come back all over France, and living society has no idea what to do with them.
DISCUSSION:
An excellent recommendation from a regular reader, I was pleased to see that this was never released in the U.S., because if it was I don’t see how I could possibly have missed it. Why does La Moustache get released here and this doesn’t? Ya got me.
The movie opens with groups of mostly elderly people streaming slowly out of a cemetery. People who have died in the past ten years have inexplicably returned to life, albeit somewhat dazed and a little out of sync. At first, living society decides to house them all in detention centers in order to study them and take a census. This leads to a lot of thematic material about “who’s really in the detention center?” as we intercut seamlessly between the lives of the revenants in the detention centers and the regular suburbans in their houses.
We also meet our characters. Isham and his wife Veronique, who lost a young son and are told on their first meeting him upon his return; “You don’t have to hug your son.” The Mayor, who recently lost his wife, and Rachel, who looks like gaunt Sandra Bullock, and who lost her husband Mathieu. The movie doesn’t hit you over the head with these character’s histories, but you can tell what their loved ones meant to them based solely on their performances. Rachel in particular successfully portrays the deep love she had for her husband through her reaction to his reappearance alone. After a short while the revenants are allowed to return to live with their families.
The movie then settles into everyday issues, like whether the revenants should be allowed to have their jobs back, and what will happen to the people who replaced them. It is found that the revenants exhibit a sort of time lag in their talk and work—they don’t seem to know that they’ve been gone for a while. They are also in excellent physical health, quite strong and vital, and are unusually resistant to disease. All of these facts start to become more than a little ominous, and are handled with that kind of very low-key tension that seems to be unique to French films, from Red Lights to Cache.
Now this is a very interesting and unsettling movie, especially of interest to zombie movie fans who would like to see their favorite subject handled with a little more seriousness [although at the end, answers are few]. That said, if you haven’t seen it and are interested, I would advise you to go away and watch it, then come back and read the rest later. It’s better not to know how this thing develops.
SPOILERS > > >
So they find that the revenants are getting up and taking walks at night and—this totally creeped me out—are holding meetings. No one knows what they’re talking about. The living are having trouble containing them, so they invent an inhibiting drug that is to be slipped into their food or drink on the sly—we are not supposed to let them know we are drugging them. We find that their temperature is lower than ours, and rig weather balloons to float over the city, offering us constant surveillance of their movement.
While this goes on Rachel meets her husband and has trouble becoming intimate with him, but they end up having sex—which raised a bunch of questions right there. She also has some [RATHER attractive] guy following her around and keeping tabs on her. The Mayor finds his wife wandering away at night. Isham is holding onto his son, but his wife Veronique cannot accept him as the same person who died. It is speculated that the dead don’t know what they’re doing, and can only repeat lines they remember from life and imitate the living.
Now the entire movie has been very tense, and one’s suspicions that the revenants are up to something sinister are realized when they start to blow shit up! It seems that they do this to create a diversion, because they want to get underground for some reason. Many of them go down into these tunnels, but the military gasses some others. They are placed on their graves, and in the morning their bodies just fade away. There are no answers, just some haunting images, and it all ends.
< < < SPOILERS END
I was TOTALLY into it from start to finish, so I was a little surprised to see that so many people on the IMDb hated it. Yes, there’s the old complaint that it’s boring, but what seemed to bother people the most is that at the end you get no answers. I think that the reason there are no answers is that the movie is clearly trying to tell you that the answers aren’t the point—the exploration of the many issues that this film brings up IS the point. If I had to guess, I would speculate that it’s about the issue of immigration in France; do they have the right to work? Should we have relationships with them? Can they ever really be a member of society? Are they up to something sinister? Should we keep them under surveillance?
I was perfectly happy never to get any answers, and I thought it best to tell you that you’re not going to get any. The deeply unsettling mood and the many provocative questions this movie raised was enough for me. It’s well-directed, low-key and steadily moving throughout, with many shots that are not startlingly well-composed in themselves, but which made me kind of jump when they occurred within the context of the story.
The director of this did a number of movies I wanted to see but never did, including Time Out and Human Resources, and also wrote the very good [and equally emotionally intense] Heading South. All of them are now firmly ensconced on my Netflix list. Anyway, definitely for those who love the zombie movies but want a little more artsiness and no gore, or those who are just into those unusually unsettling French thrillers.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Yes, it was really engrossing. Just be aware that it gives you NO answers at the end.
