Saturn Bowling

(Bowling Saturne, Patricia Mazuy, France/Belgium, 2022)

When I beheld the final image of Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel (2023) – the two female protagonists triumphantly walking away as the site of their preceding problems explodes into flame behind them – I couldn’t help but recall its indelible corresponding image in Patricia Mazuy’s tremendous Travolta et moi (1994). (Catherine Breillat’s Romance [1999] offers, in contemporary film history, another, interim example.)

And that instantly led to a further comparison of these filmmakers: what Green deliberately avoids including in The Royal Hotel – namely, any outbreak of violence, and especially sexual violence – is exactly what Mazuy shows, in confronting detail, in Saturn Bowling. Moreover, what we witness in the latter case is doubly shocking in that it begins as a genuinely erotic encounter. Until, all of a sudden, it turns very nasty.

Saturn Bowling is a film about masculine inheritance: the transmission, through the family line, of rage, need for control, twisted and perverse impulses of domination and dominion. The sex drive and the killing kick get confused in these guys. On a visceral level – because that’s where Mazuy aims to affect you – it is less a matter of cultural conditioning than sheer, bad blood. It’s in the body, the guts – and also in physical property: the living space into which Armand (Achille Reggiani) moves after his father dies, and the bowling alley that comes along with it.

Like Samuel Fuller, Mazuy grounds everything concretely, not in metaphor. We feel the oppressive influence of walls, carpets, trophies, memorabilia (it reminded me of some Vincente Minnelli melodramas of the 1950s in that way). And also the skin-connection of brothers, Armand with Guillaume (Arieh Worthalter). Half brothers; therefore half connected and half disconnected. It’s a critique of patriarchy, for sure – a patriarchy that exudes an extremely high level of toxicity – but focused in something that works as cinema.

Guillaume is a cop. Eventually – the script mechanism (plotted by Mazuy and returned collaborator Yves Thomas) tries to delay this as long as possible, with a slight strain on verisimilitude – he will have to confront Armand. And a tough dog (“He’s not happy with you”, ominous words indeed – human/animal bonds go a long way in Mazuy, as in Sport de filles [2011]) will play a major role in the way it all ultimately goes down.

And I mean vertically, right down: as in Travolta et moi, the willed plunge of a character wields a tremendously forceful kick. In Bowling Saturn, that final act is carefully and cleverly prepared for in three separate moments of the story – the first two stages involving a funnel that Armand attaches from window to ground. And once the Fall has occurred, Mazuy adds to it a different kind of emotional frisson, in the exchange of looks and gestures between two witnessing characters. (I’m deliberately being vague about the specific narrative details, which it’s best for each spectator to discover for themselves.)

Before that, Guillaume – no mere, shadowy reflection of, or foil for, the anti-hero – has a story thread of his own. (Mazuy described the film, at the Gijón Film Festival, as having a “binomial” structure, maneuvering a gradual switch-over in narrational POV.) And, as elsewhere here and in every Mazuy film, that story begins from and is driven by desire: the intense attraction between he and Xuan (Y-Lan Lucas), a fierce animal rights activist. Nobody makes ‘one look and love breaks out’ cinema – the cinema of sudden and decisive romantic-erotic encounter between very different types – quite like Mazuy!

Xuan’s path leads back to the friends of the now absent father: an unlovely, racist bunch of hunters who enjoy getting together at the Saturn. All are men, of course! The absoluteness of the male/female divide is stronger and more melodramatic here than in any previous Mazuy film; that provides both for its fascination, but also its somewhat schematic, Manichean limit. For even Guillaume will fall prey to that inherited influence; as Mazuy has commented, “Guillaume balances Armand, and both are balanced by their father”.

Mazuy is a consummate director. Just look at the opening scene, which choreographs Armand walking in the night street, and Guillaume cruising up beside him in a car to issue a stern reminder of the father’s funeral (which Armand does not attend): every element of space (on and off), differential types and rhythms of movement, and shot-to-shot tension (Mathilde Muyard, editor of Sport de filles and Paul Sanchez is Back! [2018] for Mazuy, does her usual splendid work) is perfect. The mise en scène, in general, plays out in variable gradations of closeness and distance between the characters – even when they’re moving about in vehicles.

And those fantastic whip pans (which have become her signature), which connect and express everything! – the choice remnant of the freer, more mobile camera style Mazuy had going in Travolta et moi and her extraordinary debut, Peaux de vaches (1989). The cinematographer here is Simon Beaufils, who also shot Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023) and Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart (2018).

The centrepiece of Saturn Bowling is less its horrific sex-murder than a gathering of the animal hunters clan in the bowling alley. Like many key elements in Mazuy’s work, it was (as she avows) revised and reworked drastically between scripting and final edit – she’s a director who really follows her impulses concerning what is and isn’t working out during the shoot. She brought it all together, ultimately, with a song (whose lyrics she personally crafted, Paul Schrader-style) that the men sing as they face a video screen that gives us archival images of the grim father-figure – and a mounting arc of sexual excitement and even ‘discharge’ in the onlooking Armand.

It’s possible, even easy, to reduce this scene to the evident point it makes within the overall schema of the film. But – and this is almost always true of Mazuy’s work – to watch it, to experience it, to feel it and take it in is wholly another matter, happening on a much more fused, organic, compelling level.

Her cinema delivers the all-in thrill – the ambivalent combo of enthralled involvement with scarified detachment – that Martin Scorsese’s used to wield, before (like Kitty Green) he morally-ethically ‘eschewed’ the spectacle of violence. Closer to early Kathryn Bigelow (who eventually took a different road away from enervating spectacle), Mazuy stays in contact with fertile traditions of action in all its cinematic senses and extensions.

© Adrian Martin November 2022 / February 2024