SFIFF53: Domain

Patric Chiha's second feature Domain is an interesting and thoughtful if slightly brittle drama about a seductive woman and her adoring nephew, starring the notorious French actress Beatrice Dalle. She plays Nadine, a mathematician whose absolutist statements betray a fierce will to order which in turn guards a chaotic interior life she completely denies. Her persona is extreme, a dominatrix fantasy irresistible to the 17 year-old Pierre, who flirts on the edges of an obsession, choosing her dresses and high heels in a timid attempt to stage-manage a sensation he is not mature enough to understand. That Nadine's image is at odds with her reality is something Pierre must come to terms with, and his doing so constitutes a rite of passage for them both. Nadine's need for him to adore her as the inaccessible domina is of the essence of her instability, and as things progress we discover the toll such an elaborate defence mechanism has taken on her health. Her alcoholism brings her crashing to the floor on more than one occasion, and at a certain point we learn she has incurred a potentially fatal cirrhosis as well. The woman who, at the beginning of the film, charms young men with her physical and intellectual presence, who speaks authoritatively about rhythm and beauty and order is reduced to a pathetic figure in rehab who complains that her vision of structure behind chaos has dissolved, that disorder is permanent, that life is not worth living.

It has to be said that the intellectual pretensions of this script do not entirely come off. Nadine's academic world is unconvincing, one-dimensional - in fact it really only has stylistic implications. Her theoretical statements are like the foam that skims off the top of a glamorous identity disorder. And they belong to an atmosphere I can only describe as inorganic; an aesthetic which leans toward what is artificial and contrived, a sort of sterile geometry which finds its visual home in the frozen forests at the end of the film. This aesthetic is connected, I think, to the revelation of Pierre's homosexuality, if only because it brings his adoration of the female-as-icon into sharper focus. Nadine is ultimately just another Joan Crawford-Bette Davis fantasy figure, interesting (to gay men) not as a real person but as a representation of something deeply felt and aggressively pursued. If the aesthetic is a conscious attempt to acknowledge what is destructive about this approach to femininity, it is a very sensitive one indeed. But Chiha's treatment of his male lead leaves me unsure about his intentions in this respect. Pierre's despicable act in the final scene, which suggests a destructive subtext all his own, does not sufficiently undo the effect of his portrayal hitherto as innocent, even angelic. If relationships like this one are to be understood as mutually complicit there needs to be a more thorough examination of male culpability than this. That being said, it is also true that self-understanding tends to come in sudden leaps, that the issue of culpability is not always the most direct route to the heart of a problem, and that cruelty itself, or at least, the life-negating impulse enshrined in this film, might be viewed in more than one light. Think of Freud's death instinct, or of Sade's theater of erotic cruelty, of Bataille or Nietzsche or Foucault. Seen from this angle, both Nadine and Pierre (in his final act) are actualizing something dark and paradoxical at the center of human life. At its outer limits, the film could be viewed as a purely symbolic journey altogether, a journey in which nobody is actually hurt and all decisions, or excisions, are applied to aspects of identity. Chiha has chosen a difficult, highly combustible theme to work with, and I think he has chosen to avoid some of its nuances and highlight others in service of what is ultimately a very provocative film. Sometimes provocation is a virtue contingent upon vice - and seen in this light, the film's flaws, the things it doesn't say, are actually its merits.