You Love to See It: Hagazussa (Patreon)

The rape scene which marks the beginning of Hagazussa’s final act takes place both on and offscreen, the goatherd Albrun’s body below the neck and the man violating her both excluded from the suffocating close-up on her face and the face of the rape’s orchestrator, Swinda. The moment’s significance exists only between the two women; the man is an accessory. In this way, first-time director Lukas Feigelfeld paces the boundary line of rape as a physical act and rape as an emotional trauma that reverberates through every connection in an individual’s life. That the scene culminates two separate emotional threads — Albrun's persecution by the Alpine villagers and the lesbian tension between her and Swinda — is no accident, and Swinda’s manner as she lays in the grass beside the terrified Albrun is as intimate as a lover’s. She touches the captive woman’s face. She whispers in her ear. Is she, in some way, bridging her taboo desire for Albrun through the intercession of a man’s body?

If she is, it’s an experience from which Albrun is excluded. Actress Aleksandra Cwen is so believably trapped inside the moment, inside her body, that with nothing at her disposal but her own facial expressions she renders the scene nearly unwatchable. Her eyes roll, whites yellowish and wild. Her mouth hangs open in a kind of a slack, disbelieving grimace of fear. Her nostrils flare. She writhes under the unseen bulk of her rapist as Swinda lies still and calm beside her, the other woman’s stillness making Albrun’s childish thrashing that much more pathetic. The futility of resistance is obvious from the start, and Cwen communicates with devastating immediacy that Albrun knows this, that her panic is the panic of an animal with its leg caught in a snare. 

Why doesn’t Feigelfeld show us the man in the act of raping Albrun? The clearest implication is that it’s Swinda, not this unnamed villager, who is perpetrating this violation. We see her face and the face of her victim because they are the only parties truly involved, and thus theirs are the emotions that matter. As rape is the symbolic and sometimes literal penetration of our interiority, a reaffirmation that our free will and autonomy are bounded by coercive violence, Hagazussa opts to focus on the way the simple act spreads like ink in water through a woman’s body, her brutalization drawing up some dark and desperate thing from deep within her until its convulsions become indistinguishable from hers.