A short film from 1966 that serves as an interesting precursor to SALO, OR 120 DAYS OF SODOM/ Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975). Many of the themes of that notorious film, and the nearly-as-controversial VIVA LA MUERTE (1971), were aired in the 20 minute SADNESS OF THE ANTHROPOPHAGI/Tristesse des Anthropophages, the first professional short made by France’s Jean-Denis Bonan. Just 23 at the time, Bonan, who later formed the activist filmmaking collective ARC, sought to dramatize political themes in the form of an absurdist drama (with help from his similarly oriented friend Jean Rollin, who produced the film). Bonan was rewarded for his efforts by having his film banned by French censors in 1967, lending it a forbidden allure Bonan’s 1968 feature A WOMAN KILLS/La Femme Bourreau, which went unreleased until the 2010s, didn’t attain.
In SADNESS OF THE ANTHROPOPHAGI two men emerge from trees. One of them is a “coprophagy producer” for a Parisian restaurant wherein guys crap in a fish tank, the results of which are served to the restaurant’s hungry patrons (a none-too-subtle metaphor for mindless consumption). This is followed by a man (Bonan himself) being stripped naked by a hostile mob and killed for the crime of singing in public. He comes back to life, albeit in the form of a different man (Bernard Letrou).
This enrages the crowd, who pursue the man through the countryside. He finds refuge in an apartment inhabited by a woman (Catherine Deville) wrapped in bandages, with whom he has violent sex before being recaptured by the mob. They put him on trial in an abandoned outdoor ruin and then chain and whip him (a la Jesus), while subjecting the woman he ravished to sticks and stones (a la Mary Magdelene).
But then the man awakens in the restaurant of the early scenes, squatting over the fish tank. He falls in, and the diners to elect to eat him.
Gore, nudity and a treatment that unites the arty and exploitive: the keystones of Jean-Denis Bonan’s later works (A WOMAN KILLS in particular) are all here. Cinematographer Gerard de Battista, one of Bonan’s key collaborators, provides a good looking, professionally lit black and white visual-scape (albeit without the artfulness of Battista’s work on A WOMAN KILLS, which incorporated expressionistic shades of darkness), complete with the lengthy tracking shots that would become a major Bonan trademark.
The subject matter hews toward the obvious, and the film on the whole is a bit too eager to shock. Bonan’s talent was never allowed to reach its full potential, leaving us with promising beginner projects like this film and A WOMAN KILLS—that beginner, however, was an extremely talented one who accomplished more in his early stages than most filmmakers have managed in an entire career.
Vital Statistics
SADNESS OF THE ANTHROPOPHAGI (TRISTESSE DES ANTHROPOPHAGES)
Luna Park Films Distribution
Director/Screenwriter: Jean-Denis Bonan
Producer: Jean Rollin
Cinematography: Gerard de Battista
Editing: “Mao-Ri-Tonh” (Jean-Denis Bonan), Alain Yves Beaujour
Cast: Bernard Trou, Nicole Romain