[douglasdickel]

Hors Satan
(Tim Terhaar/Tiny Mix Tapes)


Watching Hors Satan (“Outside Satan”) was a mystical experience for me. As such, unfortunately, I’ve found it maddeningly difficult to try to communicate its power through language. My chief frustration isn’t that I won’t be able to move you toward an understanding of some concept I felt shimmering at the margin of my awareness in the theater — whatever notion I nearly possessed needs no name; it’s a mere token of the emotional epiphanies I passed through: necessity, love, the Absolute — but simply that I won’t be able to convince you of the film’s importance. What’s important to me might not be important to you, after all, each heedless of the other’s universals.

One further note: I recommend taking the film as a fable and its events as literal imaginary events — as opposed symbolic real (parable), literal real (documentary), or symbolic imaginary (dreams), for example.

Hors Satan takes place in and around the village of Ambleteuse on the Opal Coast of northern France. The landscape is astonishing; wind is its primary characteristic, blowing through the woods and the marsh grasses and across the beach. In fact, the land is the film’s central force and strongest presence.

That’s saying a lot, because David Dewaele and Alexandra Lemâtre — in her first film role — give incredibly expressive, quiet performances as the Guy and the Girl. They’re also both riveting to look at. I hadn’t seen Dewaele before, and his face was a shock at first. He has a weak jaw, weathered features, a mouth often frozen in a frown, and a steady, penetrating gaze. His gait has something other-than-human about it. Lemâtre is beautiful as well, characterized most obviously by her pallor and short dyed-black hair.

Hors Satan admits no small talk, witty banter, windy pontificating, or sweet nothings. There’s also no music, which is the only kind of masterpiece for my taste. Music enough are the sounds of wind, footsteps, breathing, and birdsong (as well as a briefly hallucinated two-chord organ progression buried in the whir of the 35mm projector during a scene in which the Girl and the Guy pray on their knees while facing a cow pasture suffused with sunlight). The sound recording is synced so that one’s hearing doesn’t track the distance of the source in the frame, which gives the film’s noises the sensuality of a soundtrack.

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