BAS-FONDS
2010, France
French actress/director Isild Le Besco's Bas-fonds ('The Dregs') could almost be seen as a violent, inverse doubling of her debut short feature Demi-tarif - the latter hailed by Chris Marker as the vanguard of a resurgent Nouvelle Vagues - which studies three children left at length in an apartment without adult supervision, and the self-contained version of a family that they fashion in isolation.
Bas-fonds similarly focuses on a tripartite pseudo-family, headed up by the hulking, explosively-tempered Magalie Pichon (Valérie Nataf) who is served and sated by the attentions of her petite lover Barbara (Ginger Romàn) and her borderline-autistic younger sister Marie-Steph (Noémie Le Carrer).
They live together in a squalid apartment - the toilet encrusted with blood and the wall beside it lined with self-loathing graffiti, the floor littered with jumbo-sized ravioli cans - and live out their days in a confluence of sexual, vocal and boozy gluttony.
Barbara - "the pretty one" - is seen as the only breadwinner, whose earnings as a janitor allow Mag to lie in bed all day with dirty feet, masturbating to lesbian porn on TV and yelling viciously at the others from her reposed position in the back bedroom.
Occasionally Mag does leave the bed, if only to stomp to the other room to get beer and to dish out physical and verbal abuse which is so shrill and incessant that it immediately posits the other two as mentally disturbed just by their ability to tolerate it.
But as Le Besco's offscreen narration of Psalm 139 suggests (in its reading as a love-letter from a servant to their master), Mag is perceived as some kind of goddess, despite her monstrosity.
Barbara later recounts how she first became drawn to, and fell in love with, this flailing free-spirit, whose lack of social constraints at one time held a seed of transcendent possibility before it degenerated into hatred and sadism.
When the three girls invade a bakery after hours in a spree of vandalism and thievery, Mag accidentally shoots the baker (a young good looking man scarcely older than they are) and they escape, but the incident puts further strain on the dynamic in the apartment.
Marie-Steph is seized by nightmares and has to sleep in her sister's bed (with the dog she stole at gunpoint from a passing pedestrian), displacing Barbara, who is being given the cold shoulder by her sour-faced lover.
Barbara and Marie-Steph begin to aggressively compete for Mag's attention, and when she fails to win back Mag's favour, Barbara takes drastic action that will spark the irreversible infiltration of the outside world.
