I first saw Alexandre Aja's High Tension (also known as Switchblade Romance) in 2003 when it was released in the United States. As someone certainly unfamiliar with the narrative's "twist," I found myself quite admiring strong, smart, Final Girl, Marie (Cecile De France). In the face of full-on French redneck rage and slaughter, Marie played her cards carefully--unlike her friend Alex (Maiwenn) and Alex's "clueless" family, whose country home Marie visits in a remote part of the French countryside.
Marie notices the family dog going ballistic after everyone has turned in, and shortly after the family patriarch investigates and answers the door, Marie soon hears sounds of mayhem and slaughter from below her attic guest room. What does Marie do? She quickly covers up all signs of her existence in the room, and she hides.
I thought this move was pretty wise. She seems to hold her breath more than adequately and not draw the psycho killer's attention. Phew. Unfortunately, Marie doesn't choose to stay under the bed, and tries to rescue Alex (she's too late to save Mom, Dad, and little brother, Tom). She sneaks onto the creepy killer's monster van where he has stashed poor Alex for some horrifying future use. Marie is determined to save her friend, and contacts the authorities at a gas station (while psycho fills the tank), and manages to stay alive long enough to vanquish the killer in some bizarre plastic tented lair.
I think it's also important to talk about the killer, played by Philipe Nahon, who portrays an equally repulsive character in Gasper Noe's I Stand Alone.
He's a stocky guy, dressed in a filthy jumpsuit, dirt under his fingernails, and a handy switchblade in his hand. He's like some evil French "Man with a Van" (or something akin to an animal trailer), who likes to use women's heads as a masturbatory tool--and they don't have to still be attached to the women from whom they came. Really, really nasty!!
His motivations for all this bloody slaughter and misogyny are pretty unclear. Is he pissed because those French yuppies are cluttering up the countryside by refurbishing remote farmhouses? Is he killing because he's a man and its a Saturday? That reasoning seems most likely. Still, he's met his match in Marie, and when they face-off in the woods, she bashes his head in with a barb-wire club, smothers him in plastic, and then impales him. Yeah!! Final Girl wins! Or so one thinks....If you don't want to know the "twist," stop reading now. **Spoilers Ahead.
MASTURBATION IS BAD!
Everything starts turning pear-shaped well before the big reveal, and it's only in retrospect that High Tension becomes truly interesting--because otherwise, finding out that Marie's just a crazy lesbian and the actual killer all along tends to just PISS A VIEWER OFF! Or this one at least.
Early in the film, as the family beds down, Marie steps outside for a quick smoke, looking through the farmhouse windows from her perch on a swing outside. She happens to gaze upon Alex showering, and Alex spends a great deal of time making sure her breasts are very clean. From an earlier conversation, one might notice that Alex is fairly free in her sexual liaisons, whereas Marie has yet to express any interest in any of the guys the two encounter. After Marie climbs the stairs to her attic perch, she puts on her mp3 player and decides to pleasure herself. And just as she orgasms, the killer shows up at the door. Coincidence??
Now there are quite a few plot holes in this film that have plagued many viewers, but really, when were horror films all about making logical sense? They're nightmares, and this particular film forces you to identify with the fractured subjectivity of Marie, whose repressed desires are manifested in some giant fetid male misogynist. Is this film suggesting that Marie has internalized French homophobia and heterosexism so powerfully that her only way to cope with her desire for Alex is to punish herself and everyone around her? I'm not so sure.
Only in the gas station's surveillance footage, and in a flashback montage at the film's end, do viewers actually see Marie enacting violence against anyone but the film's killer. Every single act of torture and bloodshed is embodied in this disgusting, hulking man, even when he/Marie comes after the film's real Final Girl, Alex, with a giant saw. This visual "trick" allows the viewer to identify and sympathize with Marie through almost all of the film, displacing the film's horrors onto a killer that fulfills our slasher film expectations.
Unfortunately, we cannot "unlearn" Marie's involvement in the brutal crimes against Alex and her family, and our sympathies can only stretch so far. The film ends as it begins, with a hospitalized Marie, scarred and rambling, telling herself (and the audience) that no one can ever come between her and Alex again. She's broken. The question remains, has a homophobic culture caused this break, or are we only left, at film's end, with another crazy, killer lesbian?
