Roughly midway through pitchblack French comedy Bloody Oranges (Oranges Sanguines), a quote from Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci appears onscreen. “The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”
While Gramsci may have written this in 1937 from a prison cell in Fascist Italy just as World War II loomed, he could well have penned the line — or at least the second half of it — about this key moment in Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s film, which is getting a Midnight Screening in Cannes.
It’s at this point in the film when the story makes a somewhat unexpected gear change, shifting from a razor-sharp satire to one featuring some of the most eye-wateringly WTF scenes likely to be seen on the Croisette this year. Monstrous behavior, the film argues, is everywhere and everyone has their reasons, from angry taxi drivers urinating on their road-rage rivals to teenage victims of sexual assault who take self-defense into Saw-like realms.
Related Stories
“The film is filled with bad guys, but in this case what happens is that the bad people always find someone who’s even more evil than they are,” says Meurisse, whose starting point was a real-life news article about a U.S. girl who was tried after torturing her rapist for four hours. “That fascinated me, because these stories bring out the monstrous. So I was really interested in questioning that sense of justice.”
Before the more grimace-inducing moments in the second half, Bloody Oranges weaves together several sharply caustic tales from contemporary France. A kindly retired couple about to lose their home because of debt turns to a rock dance competition for their financial salvation. Meanwhile, a shady finance minister overseeing stinging economic cutbacks is found to be hiding vast sums of money overseas. Things don’t end remotely well for the politician, but the full crescendo of madness — the element likely to dominate most postfilm discussions — peaks with the young rape victim and a moment involving two recently removed testicles, a microwave and a rather unwilling diner.
Bloody Oranges as a name might not appear to even remotely touch on the film’s themes (Meurisse claims he prefers titles that aren’t “immediately graspable” and are “more evocative”). But he suggests that the fruit is an almost perfect metaphor for the hypocrisies of modern-day society. “On the outside, we’re super sweet, we look attractive. But inside us, there’s this bloody juice waiting to explode,” he says. “And if I were to further intellectualize it, we’re caught between the desire to be a social construct of being sweet and the savage drives that are feeding our hearts.”
