Au fond des bois (Benoît Jacquot, 2010)

An interesting and at times troubling film, but not entirely for the right reasons. Au fond des bois tells the story - based on real events from the 1860s - of a mysterious wild boy who brings a young woman under his hypnotic control, abducts and rapes her, only to eventually be caught, brought to trial, and sentenced. The film is unfussily shot in a way I found sometimes effective and sometimes a little too bland; similarly with the constantly present score, efficiently rendered in a familar "early 20th century avant-garde" style (think Berg, etc.). The film is most interesting when it addresses questions about our responsibilities for our actions (and our knowledge of our own motivations) in a way that - given that hypnosis is still poorly understood today - allows the film to play on our 21st century complacency that we can easily judge right and wrong in situations such as the film depicts. Some of the scenes where Josephine tries to assert her innocence, after the authorities have tracked the pair down, play interestingly on power dynamics and sexual politics. But, at least on a single viewing, the rather leering manner in which the film depicts its multiple rapes, and the tender parting it gives its protagonists, seem to me to tend towards crudifying the question at issue into one of "did she want to, or didn't she" - and more than this, to come down on the side of the first option: he wasn't really raping her, he just didn't know any better, and it was all to her benefit in the long run because it enabled her sexual awakening. Which, to put it more mildly than it deserves, won't do at all.