![]() With sisters and brothers, you can go from love to hate to love to hate – and you don’t need to explain why you go from one extreme to the other. Julia Ducournau: It’s a cinematic relationship. And then there’s the cannibal layer as well… There’s already a complicated relationship between the sisters: the rivalry, the bit when they try to piss like guys, and Justine wondering if Alexia represents her future. And it’s not interesting if you’re focused on the fact they’re going to fuck. They’re everything they need in this chaos that surrounds them. They’re friends, they’re brothers, they’re lovers. And if he was straight, at the start of the movie we would have all thought, “OK, they’re going to fuck.” We would have spent the whole movie waiting for them to fuck.įor me, their relationship is way more than that. He looks at her in a non-sexual way, which is very important, because I didn’t want to sexualise her body. Adrien represents the eyes of the audience on Justine. Most teen movies have a romantic storyline, but Justine gets paired with a gay male flatmate. If you repress the dark side of humanity, you can’t think about that. There’s also a danger in freedom: if you follow all your impulses, you hurt people and cross a line. My movie is also about love – and too much love, even. If I’m asking what it means to be human, I have to tackle the edges of the subject. If I only saw a Disney version of life, I wouldn’t make movies. Personally, I don’t think you can grow as a person or society by repressing things. Julia Ducournau: Some people don’t want to accept the reality. Is that why there have been extreme reactions to Raw? I saw a Q&A you did where someone angrily heckled you. It’s inside us, and it’s still a big taboo that we prefer to see from afar. Your head will say no, but the curiosity of your body will want to go further. We used to do this when we were kids, but try it today: if you pretend to bite someone’s hand, your teeth will have a strange, ticklish feeling. I think it’s a problem with accepting the fact that cannibalism is part of humanity, whether we like it or not. It’s incredibly weird because they do exist, just as murderers and people who commit incest do. They’re treated like aliens from out of space, or hoards of zombies. They’re always a group of people that are anonymous. Your teeth will want to go further” – Julia DucournauĬannibal movies are very different because they treat cannibals like “they”. “We used to do this when we were kids, but try it today: if you pretend to bite someone’s hand, your teeth will have a strange, ticklish feeling. There are way fewer movies about incest, but generally, the perpetrators in those are treated like human beings. In movies like Se7en, the murderer, Kevin Spacey, does these horrible things, but he’s still a human being. There are three taboos in humanity: murder, incest and cannibalism. ![]() Why is cannibalism such a taboo compared to other types of murder? There are films like Basic Instinct that make the killer a love interest, but that doesn’t really happen with cannibals. She’s in between these two worlds of animals and people. But no, the reason for vet school is to have the presence of animals onscreen as a constant reminder of the dilemma inside Justine. Julia Ducournau: I think accountant school could be creepy. Why did you pick a veterinary school as the setting? I mean, it’d be a different film if they were training to be accountants. Earlier this week, we spoke to Julia Ducournau about societal taboos, French hip-hop, and the dangers of repressing our animal nature. With cannibalism acting as a metaphor for sex, growing up, and an immeasurable lust for life, let’s just say Raw serves up plenty to chew on. Justine’s wildchild older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) seems to know what’s up, and her non-judgemental gay flatmate Adrien (Rabah Naït Oufella) asks a question: is she into S&M, or something kinkier? Soon, she develops a body rash, a sexual appetite, and a taste for something meatier. This includes swallowing a raw rabbit kidney which, for Justine, a lifelong vegetarian, leads to a transformation. In Raw, Garance Marillier plays Justine, a student entering veterinary school and, by default, its blood-soaked hazing rituals. Unpredictable to the end, it depicts the post-adolescent tightrope journey of discovering your body, your desires, and whether anyone can be trusted with these secrets. Was it the sight of a friendly face devouring human flesh? Or the uncompromising depiction of a teenage girl’s sexual awakening? Gruesome the gore may be at times, Raw’s pleasures are in its smart, unconventional, wickedly funny take on the coming-of-age genre. When Julia Ducournau’s feminist body horror Raw played at TIFF, audience members passed out in the aisles.
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