Whichever way she may have been raised, Justine is now going to university to become a vet, so she can decide on her lifestyle. Do parents have the right to withhold meat from their children? Do parents have the right to stop them from eating pork or drinking alcohol? Can parents encourage their girls to put on a hijab? Can they decide not to send them to mixed swimming lessons? Can they decide whether their sons will be circumcised? This being the Francophone world, of course, the moment becomes instantly political and a metaphor for many other things. We seem to be in a situation where a family has decided on the diet of their children. The following conversation among the three members of the family doesn’t make it clear if Justine has an allergy to the meat or if she is vegetarian by choice. She spits, almost vomits it out – we are getting ready early in the film for convulsions and expulsions of the body. Justine’s (and with this, there are shades of Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia”) plate of mashed potatoes seems to have a meatball in it. The tension mounts when they stop for lunch. There are already hints of Michael Haneke’s middle-class angst here, with the wife seeming to be fawning over the husband, leaving the daughter somewhat alone. The scene then switches to Justine traveling with her overbearing parents, and in the close space of the car, it is clear all is not well. “Raw,” then, will be the back story of how the girl got to be there. Here’s a girl who has hunted down “raw” flesh and is about to get her quarry. It doesn’t take a minute, but Ducournau has already told a whole story, particularly when coupled with the film’s English title. “Raw” opens with a wide shot of the French countryside where a slim figure in the distance seems to cause a car crash willingly and then walks toward the bungled-up vehicle. For those of us, it is a film to be enjoyed on a small screen. It would be a pity if those interested in contemporary France missed out on it, because, they, like me, think the horror genre to be a no-go area. To understand what charmed the Cannes jury in Julia Ducournau’s “Titane,” one can turn to her 2016 film “Grave” (“Serious”), publicized in English as “Raw,” possibly to attract horror film lovers with a darker name, and even suggest a kinship with the successful series “Saw.” There is, indeed, much sawing of flesh in this film, however, the atmosphere immediately invites a metaphorical and political reading.
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