A religiously devout young woman surrenders herself to the carnal side of spiritual love in Swiss writer-director Carmen Jaquier’s passionate, lyrical, visually ravishing debut feature Thunder, which has just world premiered in both Toronto and San Sebastian. Drawing on the agony and ecstasy in Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), Jaquier’s feverish coming-of-age drama sometimes gets a little consumed by its own self-serious, quasi-mystical pretensions. But this is still an accomplished and original debut, rooted in worthy intentions to give voice to all those voiceless women missing from the history books for being too lustful, too disobedient, too far ahead of their time. Partly inspired by the diaries of her own great-grandmother, Jaquier infuses a handsome period canvas with a very modern attitude here. Festival acclaim and awards potential should translate into solid art-house prospects.
Thunder takes place in the Swiss alps in the year 1900, though it could just as easily be 1800 from the timeless mountain scenery, austere rural communities and ingrained traditionalism on display here. After five years cloistered in a convent, 17-year-old Elisabeth (Lilith Grasmug) is bluntly summoned home to her family’s modest hillside farm with the shock news of her elder sister Innocente’s death. On arrival, a virtual stranger to her own kin, she is aghast to learn that her beloved sibling has been all but erased from the village’s collective memory. “We don’t speak of her in this house,” her mother (Sabine Timoteo) bristles. The local priest (Marco Calamandrei) is equally harsh, warning Elisabeth “we do not pray for the Devil’s spawn here.” Her younger sisters, Adele (Diana Gervalla) and Paule (Lou Iff), are sworn to secrecy about this shameful stain on the family name.
A confused, distraught Elisabeth begins to piece together the murky details of her sister’s demise through fragmentary gossip picked up from a trio of local young men (Mermoz Melchior, Benjamin Python, Noah Watzlawick), who find her both alluring and scary. “Your sister slept with everyone,” they taunt her, “even the Devil.”
Amidst all this witch-burning hysteria, discovering Innocente’s secret diary finally helps enlighten Elisabeth. Her ink-splashed, delirious prose is bursting with pornographic accounts of multiple sexual encounters that, in her eyes, were profoundly spiritual experiences bringing her closer to a true, divine, all-loving God. Hers was a radical interpretation of faith that speaks much more to early 21st century sensibilities, but which inevitably met with fierce resistance from the starchy all-male elders of a small, stifling community more than 100 years ago.
Liberated and aroused by Innocente’s example, Elisabeth cannot resist plotting her own erotic journey towards spiritual enlightenment. Her sexual awakening inevitably brings all the boys to the yard. Furtive flirtation during a visually striking masked bonfire sequence, which resembles some kind of pre-Christian pagan ritual, soon progresses to group masturbation sessions and omni-sexual orgies. There are intimate close-ups of tremulous young flesh here, but Jaquier shoots these sequences with maximum sensuality and minimum sensationalism. She also seems to intend them with a self-serious solemnity that feels very French, bordering on unintended kitsch in places. A scene in which Elisabeth lasciviously licks a slab of meat is one degree away from Monty Python parody. This almost total lack of humour is a key flaw in an otherwise absorbing and nuanced, novelistic film.
Jaquier comes from an art-school background, using vintage paintings and still photos as mood-setting motifs at the start of Thunder. One of those directly quoted is the 19th century Italian landscape painter Giovanni Segantini, who specialised in vast, lonely, alpine vistas, while the visionary early 20th century Franco-Swiss painter Marguerite Burnat-Provins helped shape the character of Innocente. Marine Atlan’s cinematography certainly delivers rich pleasures, from panoramic 360-degree mountain tableux to extreme close-ups of nature, shot in forensic digital resolution and heightened, saturated, almost psychedelic colours. Score composer Nicolas Rabaeus balances spare piano pieces with artful use of religious choral music. In one finely finessed segue, characters singing on screen blend into a more polished soundtrack version of the same song.
Thunder feels too opaque and impressionistic at times, occasionally betraying its debut-feature limitations. A little more socio-political context and a little less woozy eroticised languor might have been a stylistic compromise, but would have given this feminist-leaning critique of religious hyprocisy and perennial patriarchal sexism more timely dramatic bite.
Jacquier also has little interest in character depth, making everyone besides Elisabeth a thin sketch. But Grasmug is a magnetic discovery, her heavily internalised performance buzzing with latent energy, her face a screen-filling canvas on its own. A lingering stand-out shot of her hair dancing in the breeze, face lost in beatific rapture, every pore and follicle alive, is pure visual poetry.
Director, screenwriter: Carmen Jaquier
Cast: Lilith Grasmug, Mermoz Melchior, Benjamin Python, Noah Watzlawick, Diana Gervalla, Lou Iff, Marco Calamandrei, Sabine Timoteo
Cinematography: Marine Atlan
Editing: Xavier Sirven
Music: Nicolas Rabaeus
Producer: Flavia Zanon
Production Company: Close Up Films (Switzerland)
World sales: WTFilms
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (New Directors)
In French
92 minutes