8 A Woman Kills

[swo17]

A Woman Kills



A series of prostitute murders disturb the public with the thought of a serial killer on the loose. Hélène Picard, a prostitute, is sentenced and executed for the murders, but shortly thereafter similar crimes continue. Executioner Louis Guilbeau meanwhile develops a relationship with the investigating officer, Solange, who soon learns Louis may not be who he says he is. Filmed in the tumultuous events of May 1968, Jean-Denis Bonan's A Woman Kills never found distribution due to controversy around the director's first film and producer Anatole Dauman (The Beast, Hiroshima mon amour) was unable to find distribution for the film for 45 years until Luna Park Films brought it back to life in a new restoration. Now released on Blu-ray for the first time anywhere, audiences outside of France can finally experience this utterly singular film, a new wave-influenced serial killer film that presents its narrative in an almost true crime approach yet focuses more on the psychological aspect with echoes of Polanski and Franju, set to a discordant, jazzy score.

Limited Edition Special Features

• 2K restoration of the film from the original 16mm elements
• Original uncompressed mono PCM audio
• Audio commentary by critics Kat Ellinger and Virginie Sélavy
• Introduction by Virginie Sélavy
• On the Margin: The Cursed Films of Jean-Denis Bonan (Francis Lecomte, 2015/2022, 37 mins) - a newly updated documentary programme featuring director Jean-Denis Bonan, cinematographer Gérard de Battista, editor Mireille Abramovici, musician Daniel Laloux, and actress Jackie Rynal
• Short films by Jean-Denis Bonan: The Short Life of Monsieur Meucieu (1962, 13 mins), A Love Crime (1965, 7 mins), rushes of an incomplete film narrated by Bonan; The Sadness of the Anthropophagi (1966, 24 mins), Crazy Mathieu (1967, 17 mins), A Season with Mankind (1967, 19 mins)
• Trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by maarko phntm
• Limited edition booklet featuring new writing on the film by author and scholar Catherine Wheatley, writer and musician Richard Thomas on the short films, writing on gender identity tropes in A Woman Kills and the horror film, an interview with Francis Lecomte, the French distributor who rescued the film, newly translated archival reviews and film credits
• Limited edition of 2000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

[domino harvey]

When it was announced Radiance had licensed several French films, I joked with some apprehension that they'd just be Jess Franco movies given today's home video market. Well, props to Radiance: they somehow managed to release a film by a director even worse than Franco. This is as bad a movie as I've ever seen, incompetent to a level that it barely qualifies as a film. This is not influenced by la nouvelle vague, it's influenced by bargain basement skin flicks made for 42nd Street, and the movie follows a "New nude scene every eight minutes" structure like clockwork in this grating "exploration" of a serial killer. I note that the promotional materials leave out the actual premise of the film, probably because they'd like to sell some of the 2000 copies they've allotted to its existence. Let me illuminate for you what's been withheld

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This is another stupid crossdressing "psychological" proto-slasher, which ends in a pathetic attempt at grandiosity in declaring that the protagonist is an "open wound." No. The film talks out of the side of its mouth in trying to “explain” his actions via already-tired gay cliches of the era but his function here is solely to serve as a convenient "weirdo" boogieman with half a wig glued to his head because someone thought it would look tres cool and totes symbolic even though it makes no sense on a practical level (not that anything in this film makes sense).

Every last second and component of this film is terrible, from its soundtrack (which alternates between the worst folk ballad of all time and a Childrens' Spooky Sounds for Haunted Houses LP) to the amateur hour looping (approximately all of the non-nude inciting action happens off screen, some of which we hear about while looking at a second unit shot of a random object) to the two central performances (which between them give us the full range of awful acting from untethered overreaching to speaking lines as though they only just discovered the mechanism of speech immediately prior to the camera rolling). I legit dread coming in here and seeing the inevitable attempts to salvage this as having any value whatsoever.

[Glowingwabbit]

Having now watched 26 Franco films, I truly can't comprehend him being considered the worst director of all time. I haven't seen this, but I can only assume this isn't your kind of cinema, which is fine.

[domino harvey]

Good luck to you on this one. I think it’s immediately apparent while watching why no one would bother to release this for 45 years

[swo17]

Haven't seen this of course, but for what it's worth, to the extent that people enjoy Franco for being "so bad it's good," Fran has suggested that Radiance won't be focusing on that sort of thing

[MichaelB]

Given that my reaction is usually the exact polar opposite of Domino's (I believe zedz has made a similar observation), I'm now really looking forward to this.

[domino harvey]

To repeat myself, as someone who’s actually seen this, good luck to you on that

[swo17]

There's a joke that zedz and domino have only ever agreed on a handful of films, but they're two users whose recommendations I always try to follow and I've gotten a lot of value from both. Not that I agree with them all the time, but they're both doing some pretty deep mining into their own areas of interest, and the things they offer up as worthwhile are generally at least worth consideration. I'm hopeful so far that I can say the same for Radiance's upcoming releases, even if this one title sounds like it may not be for me

[zedz]

The nuance to that long-running gag is that, while we seldom agree about the films we love, we’re often unified in our hates.

And isn’t that what really matters?

[MichaelB]

I should probably make clear that my interest in this film was initially piqued by a good friend personally recommending it to me in the strongest possible terms.

[therewillbeblus]

Maybe the film, like its woman, kills with audiences, in one way or the other

[MichaelB]

La Femme Beaverrau.

[MichaelB]

Mondo Digital

[exidor]

Well I just watched this and for the first half hour I was pretty much in agreement with domino. It's wilfully obtuse and seems to be going out of its way to tell its story in the most annoying way possible. Then, once the killer is revealed, it picks up immensely (your mileage may vary) with

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a ten minute Parisian rooftop chase and then a lot of staggering through some old derelict warehouses. This whole section plays out a lot more coherently than what went before and did a lot to win me back around.

I think the key things that kept me watching through the early stages were the similarity in style to Rollin's Les Pays Loin and the fact that Rollin himself pops up from time to time as a minor character. And then late on there's a scene that seals the deal by using the same chainlink fence location that Rollin used. I'm easily pleased.

[therewillbeblus]

If domino has finally quit the internet, this isn't going to be positive reinforcement for a return... I actually kinda liked this, though I wouldn't defend it on the grounds of its filmmaking skills. Rather, the slapdash style of intimate exchanges mixed with police procedural (and with a messy score of either abrasively-arrhythmic jazz or ambient feral orchestrations) seemed to effectively obfuscate our focal point to the material, disrupting a sense of groundedness that the victims nor the killer nor those reading the papers wondering what's happening, as the news reverts back to a past identified killer this resembles (almost longing for him, as if they're so desperate to at least have that tangible target to project their impotences onto!) are afforded. It also played a lot like John Waters' work for me, though less obviously mining for laughs. I haven't gone through the extras yet, so I have no idea what kind of tone this was attempting, but when you introduce your first sex victim as "specializing in animalistic lovemaking," I don't know what else you could be doing except a deadpan irreverent bit (and some of the director's short films on the disc at least support that he was interested in striving for dark comic effects). The rapid editing, impulsive transitions between ideas (there's no rhythm or rule to when we're going to get the procedural narration - sometimes it floods us, then takes a break for half an hour, for no apparent reason), and guerrilla filmmaking style with a knowing concentration in low-brow exploitation make this familiar to Waters.

I agree with domino that the film makes zero sense, though I think where we disagree is that, for me that nonsensical essence appears to be a deliberate strategy while he seems to think it's working in friction with what the film wants to be about or with the messaging its trying to send. That could all be true, and if it were I'd hate this, but I didn't read it that way. exidor's observation of merits in the loooonng climactic chase is one I share, mostly because, after presenting a movie so alienating that it can't decide whether it wants to be an involving character-following narrative or a collage of distantly-reported episodes (an oscillation between not just grazing but committing to both poles accentuates its tone of psychological chaos), the film seems to finally choose to linger on one woman and give us a dose of experiential physiological havoc, before zooming out to monotonously diagnose the killer. Where domino sees unearned engagement with sympathy for the killer, I see radical disengagement from any such approach -

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The film finally commits to a would-be victim's multisensory experience ascending just psychology, after throwing around straw-grasping signifiers of occupation, sexual preoccupation, etc. to define them earlier, making it clear that it sides with them as the dignified ones against the pathetic killer - and then uses its sparse, uninterested procedural voice to dictate his psyche. The killer's identity seems to be a joke - for a while, the only surrogate desire/drive we get to experience in this film are the third hand pleas for this male killer to return, and then when we he does get the opportunity to say his piece, he blames nurture yet without telling us anything of substance. The denouement doesn't feel like an artistically-didactic intervention of synergistic validation, but another observation of his experience's worthlessness in contrast to the palpable harm he's caused.

Here's a killer explaining his psychology in the most superficial of terms, and then pretending to 'know' his victims as a black-and-white privileged conditioning compared to his - but not only do we get nothing specific (he uses vague language to stress a lust for pity), the statically-shot close-up is maybe the first time in the film that the camera has been still or that we've been granted a front-row seat to this person, and then it's instinctively ripped away before he has a chance to finish - not because the camera is afraid of him, but because even the filmmaker is bored by his trite and vapid 'explanation', and I think it's only there to laughably lie at odds with the actions that preceded it as a faux-rationalization. By offering him the mic and then expressing an organic disinterest, the film minimizes the value in these questions seeking to understand the killer's psyche; questions that were taken more seriously with endorsement through diagnostics in later examples of these kinds of psych-thrillers-with-gender-reveals. So, if anything, I see the opposite of a less-developed gender-bending proto-slasher: A reverse-deconstruction of the assumed symbiotic validation a filmmaker affords their killer, illustrated through narrative and temporal attention. The filmmaking skills may not be great here, and none of this may be intentional, but even if the deflation was a happy accident, it effectively and reflexively revealed the subconscious motivations of so many artists and audiences who support the merits of psychopaths' narratives with their obsessions yet claim full support of the victims being sidelined. It's also ironic in how this translates to our sensationalized news outlets today, whereas this film's procedural news accounts are the only non-sensationalized parts of it!