French Blood (2015)

If there’s an argument to be made about the following shot being an essentially masculine device, French Blood is the film to support it. This is a film that glories in tour-de-force long takes from the back and shoulder muscles of our protagonist, Marco, as well as the violence these muscles threaten. The epitome of this tendency is the shot that sees Marco go into a club, up the stairs, and into the bathroom; wash off his bleeding head wound; get a beer; take in the music of a fascist rock band; and then go back down the stairs to fight off some punks with his friends, only to witness two of his closest friends get brutally and suddenly shot.

Part of the film’s brilliance is to allow such takes to peter out into suffocating stillness as Marco gets older and less obviously fascist. In other words, the shots transform as the film’s definition of Marco’s masculinity transforms from an active, violent one into something non-confrontational yet seething. The film doesn’t trust Marco’s shift to peaceful adulthood and neither should we: when he wields a knife in the film’s final moments, we’re not sure if he’s going to stab one of his former friends, slit an Arab’s throat, or just the dice the carrots sitting rather numbly on the cutting board before him. This is the unpredictability of the present tense in a world that seems so far to have only realized some shining heads and an inked-through patriarchal brutality.