re:mote voices

Title: Corps à Corps
Cast: Emmanuelle Seigner, Philippe Torreton, Clément Brilland, Vittoria Scognamiglio, Yolande Moreau, Marc Duret
Director: François Hanss

corps a corps is showing around the UK briefly as part of the annual french film festival, accompanied by the writer (arthur-emmanuel pierre) and director (francois hanss). the film has been given an english title of "body snatch" for this festival, though this seems to be a name that the pair are unhappy with, while on imdb it is given the alternative title "body to body", which strikes as being a more direct translation; from the discussion after the film the pair suggested that they would have preferred "skin deep" to "body snatch".

emmanuelle seigner plays the part of laura, who explains through the voice over and flash back that she was in an accident and woke up from a coma with little memory. laura had been a stripper, but one of her customers, marco played by philippe torreton, convinced her that he was rich and they would be happy together. driving away from the strip club on her last night she had an accident, she was found thrown from the car and was only saved after hours of surgery which left her deaf and with considerable scaring.

this has obviously all been very traumatic, but laura finds that slowly she can accept her body and life with the love of philippe, so that indeed they are happy together. six years later and they have a son, but when his teacher says there is something strange about him laura starts to realise not everything is as it seems. philippe has been lying to her - his past is not what it seems, and he evidently has plans for the future.

in a lot of ways corps a corps is not the most original of films, i am sure that many of us have seen at least one film with the basic plot of a woman finding out that her man has been lying to her. evidence is unearthed stage by stage, he starts to realise what she is doing. he gets annoyed with her, but the way things are done it could all be in her head. tension grows, characters start to feel unhinged, trapped, confused. build to climax and revelation.

taking that into account however it is an effective film, dark and moody once it gets going. the mutilated lead is a curious role for any woman, seigner appears naked in several scenes - making the extensive scaring and misformed limb very much evident. torreton provides phillipe with a depth of emotion, deeply in love with laura regardless and tortured to a point of mania by her accusations and the fact that he might lose her. in between them is a child, caught up in growing frictions he can't understand - with a teacher being told by both parents that he isn't to be given to the other parent because they are unbalanced.

Q&A sessions can be interesting and awkward affairs. in this case the two are interviewed through a translator, which adds an extra layer. from this we learn that corps a corps is the first full length feature by the pair. a film which was produced independantly of the french film system, and appears to have been slated by french film critics, though reasonably well recieved by viewers.


the demolution engine - a new comic series by Steve Esslinger and Eduardo Herrera, starting with an initial 7 part story, and published by disgruntled fanboy comics. the first issue is pretty much a set up, with little being revealed at the moment. a man called trent picks up a girl hitching to vancouver - but she dies in the car, so he leaves her in the house she asked him to take her to, and runs away. meanwhile special crimes police officer john aureliens has got a call in the middle of the night, which has taken him to a rich part of town, outside his jurisdiction. there he finds a ritual murder, blood and symbols everywhere, with a savagely mutilated corpse in the middle of it all. to add to that a bloody message has been left "we are awake". there is more to this issue than that, but at the moment those are tangents leading to the future. as a first issue the demolution engine works well enough, gets us in, but without too much information as to what is going on - part crime, part supernatural, part wait and see. artistically herrera's work is striking, it is a big factor in what made me pick this up in the first place - art always is when it comes to comics. he has a very particular style, in the ballpark perhaps with a few others at work in the field at the moment, but definitely seperate from any of them. one down side of the art might be the ease with which we can re-identify characters, which is to say how able are we to recognise a character the next time we see them? i suspect this could lead to some confusion, but we will see, and for now the art works.