KNIFE+HEART – The QFest Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

KNIFE+HEART screens at this year’s QFest St. Louis at 9:00pm April 30th at the Tivoli Theatre (6350 Delmar). Ticket information can be found HERE

To watch Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart, you wouldn’t be mistaken to think that he might want to have sex with cinema. Everything in the movie is built to insight: the color palette, the content, the performances, EVERYTHING. Within the first five minutes, Knife + Heart juxtaposes the editing of a movie with an overtly sexual act, that then turns into a murder. A SEX MURDER. If that sounds like a good time to you, you should go see this movie tonight at 9pm. If that doesn’t…well then too bad for you.

    Knife + Heart is a murder mystery about getting lost in a screen dream. Anne Pareze (Vanessa Paradis) is a director of gay pornography, who has recently broken up with her editor Lois McKenna (Kate Moran). Soon, her actors start to be killed by a masked figure who uses a knife dildo to cut them up. What follows is an incredibly violent exercise in visual gymnastics. A film that will offend some and thrill others. I’m a little bit in the middle of those two options, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy watching it.

    Most of the material that may offend is mostly in the narrative, but Gonzalez doesn’t seem to care too much about that. Instead, all the energy is put into the visuals of the film and they are marvelous. The film takes on the look of multiple film stocks, multiple eras of filmmaking, a flurry of colors and so much neon. It all pays off pretty well too. The contact high you get from seeing every perfect composition and every expert cut is unbelievable, even as the story slows everything down.

    To pay some mind to the afterthought of the narrative, the elements here are familiar to anyone who knows how noir captures the human psyche. Dreams are conceptualized by visions of light, which show off a dark shadow of the world or a beautiful dreamlike escape. Anything resembling character beyond lusty passions for film and love are thrown off to the side, immaterial.

    But that’s ok. The movie has too much energy for that to matter. The actors ares are confident, the frame entertaining, and everything plays like its about to lose control. If you want to as well, enjoy. If not…again, why not?