I Would Like to See It: Calvaire (Patreon)

On a primal gut level, there’s very little as upsetting as the sound of a pig in distress. Not only is the high-pitched squeal they produce simultaneously infantile and abrasive, confusing our brains as to how to react, but the animal’s lung capacity far exceeds our own, enabling them to maintain a squeal for an agonizing length of time. Fabrice Du Welz’s Calvaire has no shortage of terrible sights and sounds, but of all of them it was the pig’s suffering that most impressed itself on me. Several times I had to pause the movie and recenter myself before continuing. Maybe it’s the animal’s innocence, its fundamental inability to understand why it’s being hurt, or the horror of observing the unique species of cruelty required to inflict that pain. Maybe it’s the emptiness of the emotional world in which the men of Calvaire’s rural village exist.

The film continually relates womanhood to the plight of the farm animal. Bartel’s (Jackie Berroyer) absent wife, Gloria, and Boris’s (Jean-Luc Couchard) missing dog are at the center of parallel story threads concerned with masculine projection and neediness, and the substitutes sought by both men are, respectively, a feminized male hostage and a calf. The first of the film’s many scenes of sexual violence depicts not a woman’s victimization, but a young pig’s, and the animal’s position and vocalizations are explicitly recreated when the same fate befalls Marc (Laurent Stevens) later on. The woman’s presence and the effects of her social role are desired with an intensity matched only by the violent contempt the film’s men feel toward womanhood. It is essential for their survival and the maintenance of their self-image, but it must be subject.

Even the film’s adult and relatively non-victimized pig, owned by one of the village’s farmer, is made to substitute for something else, serving its master as a tracker and guard dog. When something is absent from a human life, we force something else to occupy its role. Marc, too, has his own absence, his own disconnect from women. He remains cold to the advances of a nurse at the retirement home at which he performs in the film’s opening sequence and, in perhaps Calvaire’s most beautiful scene, rejects an older woman’s painfully intimate and fragile confession of desire without so much as a word. Womanhood, the film seems to say, is something men will have to endure themselves if they continue as they are. Marc’s experience of the violent stripping away of his manhood and his transformation into someone socially perceived as a woman is so blistering it could almost work as a transfeminine narrative.