Disc Reviews

We Are the Flesh Blu-ray Review

• 15th Feb 2017

Be warned that Emiliano Rocha Minter’s We Are the Flesh is a highly visceral and transgressive film that is not so much a film with a narrative as much as a feature length (at 80 minutes) body art performance piece. The narrative is not the point of the film and the viewer, for those who can last its length at any rate, must go with the flow of the film. Only retro-actively will the viewer understand what the film is about. Not only is We Are the Flesh visceral but it goes to dark places with every taboo in the book from incest, necrophilia, cannibalism, brutal graphic sacrificial killing, menstruation fluid to graphic images of sex (including graphic oral sex and open vaginas). There is something Sadean here; little surprise then that a credit goes to the Marquis de Sade (and Georges Bataille) at the end of the film.

At the start of the film we are led to believe that the setting of the film is a post apocalyptic world. It opens with Mariano scavenging in a rundown building and smashing furniture. He is building a sort of structure out of the dis-assembled furniture held together by packing tape (we later learn that what is being built is a womb like space). Two teenagers arrive, brother and sister Lucio and Fauna. Mariano bonds with Fauna and implies that Lucio is weak. Mariano eventually forces the siblings to have sex while he masturbates. When he ejaculates Mariano dies and is eventually re-born, literally in a re-birth when Fauna herself masturbates over his decaying corpse. The film goes from incoherence to some bizarre, disturbing and opaque imagery where director Rocha Minter employs some brilliant and eclectic sound design to imagery that includes some almost abstract close-up thermal imagery as Lucio has sex with his sister. But for all these shocking scenes they are all a part of a whole idea rather than a deliberate shock tactic.

As disturbing as the film may appear – and it most certainly is not for all tastes (in fact probably very few), the film does have some precedents in the spiritual, visceral and distinctly bodily fluid films of Alejandro Jodorowsky and in particular The Holy Mountain (1973). Rocha Minta must have had Jodorowsky in mind when he was making this film. But then there is also the Marquis De Sade in its amoral approach to life, death and sex with all participants acting beyond society norms. Again, even in this area there are antecedents in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò: 120 Days of Sodom (1973) in which a group of fascists gather up young local men and women and carry out an orgy of sexual violence on their captors. There are many themes here that are reminiscent of Salò including the scene in which Fauna squats over Lucio and allows her menstrual fluid to drop into his mouth. In Salò, in a similar such scene one of the fascists requests for a young female to urinate onto his face. On a personal level there is something more accessible about Salò over either Jodorowsky and We Are the Flesh. For both Jodorowsky and Rocha Minter there is also a Catholic sensibility, inevitable given that both directors are from fiercely Catholic countries (the older director is from Chile and Rocha Minter is working in Mexico).

Arrow Video have to be praised in having the vision and nerve to release We Are the Flesh. It is unlikely to shift many units, after all this is not the label’s modus operandi but it could draw some criticism but seems to have been cleared of censorship. Following any viewing of the film it would be highly recommended to view Virginie Sélavy’s verbal and visual essay on the film to give it some context. Other extras on the disc include two shorts by Rocha Minter and interviews with the director and cast of the film.

Chris Hick