Saturn Bowling (Patricia Mazuy, 2022) (Patreon)

Saturn Bowling is a film that is so blatant in its construction that it often just feels stupid. That said, the stupidity is obviously a strategy. Just to clarify, Mazuy's film is one of the most aggressively Freudian movies I've ever seen, so much so that it practically treats Freudianism like some primitive myth with which to anthropologically understand the Contemporary French Man. It's sort of a Cain and Abel story, but also an allegory about castration and the failure to abide by the Law of the Father. (Reviews that just chalk it up to "toxic masculinity" are kind of missing the point. In Saturn Bowling, there is no other kind.

The film begins after Armand Sr., the patriarch, has been buried. This occasions the reconnection of brothers who were estranged by their father. Guillaume (Arieh Worthaler) is the "good son," a local police detective quickly rising through the ranks. Armand fils (Achille Reggiani) is the "bastard" half-brother who his father disavowed. When we meet him, he's practically homeless. As a gesture of reconciliation (and because he doesn't want to be bothered with it), Guillaume entrusts the father's beloved bowling alley to Armand, along with the dad's adjoining apartment.

As we learn, Armand Sr. was part of a big game hunters' club, the sort of fat, pasty upper-middle-class morons who go to Africa to kill lions, alligators, giraffes, whatever, and bring back trophies as well as home movie footage. If we understand that Armand Jr.'s mother was another of Sr.'s conquests, then the fact that his "kill" produced life rather than death was clearly intolerable to him. Anyway, as we learn more about Armand Jr., we see that he aches to take on the mantle of his macho-man dad, going so far as to strut around in his python-skin jacket. 

Alas, Armand Jr. is a psychotic incel, feeling so entitled to young women than he jerks off in the rain next to their cars. Before long, he's using dad's old bachelor pad as a home base for luring women, fucking them, beating the shit out of them, and depositing their bodies in a hole in a cemetery. Yep, he's a serial killer, and Guillaume is the detective trying to stop him, without having a clue that his brother is the murderer.

So yeah, all three men are hunters: Armand Sr. of animals, Guillaume of criminals, and Armand Jr. of young women. Mazuy makes a strategic error by bisecting the film, the first half depicting Armand's murders with a neon-tinged, propulsive disgust, and then becoming a rather straight-ahead police procedural in the second half, centered on Guillaume. The bowling alley, while not exactly a "character," is a sort of watering hole for the father's old hunting friends, who behave like mafiosi. They represent an old-school masculine prerogative that neither of the sons has achieved, and that Mazuy suggests is a lumbering vestige from another time.

There is only one real woman character, Xuan Do (Y Lan Lucas), a research scholar and head of an animal preservation / anti-hunting NGO. She is targeted by one of the old hunters (Frédéric van den Driessche) who holds her at gunpoint, until Guillaume intervenes. This is their meet-cute, and the attraction between them is never explained. Like animal attraction, it just is. Xuan Do is in Saturn Bowling specifically to be ignored, threatened, sidelined, and discarded. Mazuy is a very capable director from what I saw here, and she is clearly working out an intellectual agenda. But like the bowling alley itself, Saturn Bowling exists strictly within a set of predetermined frames. Masculine archetypes: Mazuy sets 'em up, and knocks 'em down.