Frontière(s) (2007)

User Rating:

6.1/10   

Director:

Xavier Gens

Writer:

Xavier Gens (writer)

Release Date:

23 January 2008 (France)

Genre:

Crime | Drama | Horror | Thriller

Tagline:

What are your boundaries?

Plot:

A gang of young thieves flee Paris during the violent aftermath of a political election, only to hole up at an Inn run by neo-Nazis.

Plot Keywords:

Nazi | Teenager | Hospital | Riot | Severed Finger

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Karina Testa	...	Yasmine
Samuel Le Bihan	...	Goetz
Estelle Lefébure	...	Gilberte
Aurélien Wiik	...	Alex
David Saracino	...	Tom
Chems Dahmani	...	Farid
Maud Forget	...	Eva
Amélie Daure	...	Klaudia
Rosine Favey	...	La vieille trachéo
Adel Bencherif	...	Sami
Joël Lefrançois	...	Hans
Patrick Ligardes	...	Karl
Jean-Pierre Jorris	...	Le Von Geisler
Stéphane Jacquot	...	Le policier
Christine Culerier	...	Infirmière urgences

Also Known As:

Frontières (France) (working title)
Frontier(s) (International: English title)

MPAA:

Rated NC-17 for extreme sadistic graphic violence and gore.

Runtime:

108 min

Country:

France | Switzerland

Language:

French | German

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

USA:NC-17 | UK:18 | France:-16 | Switzerland:18 (canton of Vaud) | Switzerland:18 (canton of Geneva) | Ireland:18 | Japan:R-18 | Australia:R | Argentina:18 | Germany:18 (SPIO/JK) (cut) | Germany:18 (cut) | Finland:K-18 (self applied) | Italy:VM18 | New Zealand:R18 | Portugal:M/18

Company:

Cartel Productions

Trivia:

Banned in Thailand for its violence.

Goofs:

Continuity: In the middle of the movie, when Farid escapes to the basement, he hits Karl in the face with a sledgehammer and knocks him down. Then, in the next scene Karl is sitting at the dinner table, with no mark of that stroke on his face.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Yasmine: My name is Yasmine. I'm three months pregnant. One day, someone said "Men are born free with equal rights". The world in which I live is the opposite. Who would want to be born to grow up in the chaos and the hate? I've decided to spare him the worst.

Movie Connections:

References The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

The Final Frontier(s)?

Homage is a tricky thing–there is an extremely fine line in paying tribute to the cinematic works of others and merely ripping them off (hello, "Doomsday"!). And integrating a whiff of political commentary to give an aura of sophistication to what is, at heart, an unabashed splatter-fest, is even trickier (and much harder to pull of convincingly–see George Romero's "Living Dead" series). Despite how wobbly Xavier ("Hitman") Gens' blood-soaked "Frontier(s)" is in both of these departments, it comes out ahead due to its own maniacal, implacable energy; while prone to including too many monotonous chases that slow up (rather than quicken) the overall pace, there are scenes of such visceral savagery on display that it's hard to take your eyes off the screen. While some of the performances and characterizations veer dangerously close to camp, Gens comes close to establishing the same sort of fever-dream madness that made "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" so endearing: when an extreme right-wing candidate is elected to the French presidency, the citizens take to the streets in protest (the film's opening images are culled from actual news footage); using this as a cover, 5 small-time crooks knock off a bank and meet up at a countryside hostel that just happens to be run by several generations of an inbred, neo-Nazi family (including a patriarch that looks like B-movie king Roger Corman; and a sister who resembles Gen from The Genitortures); what ensues is a survival-of-the-luckiest chase through bowels-of-hell settings that have been well-established in the "Saw" and "Hostel" flicks. Gens also pulls (un)inspiration from the likes of "The Descent" (a fantastically claustrophobic tunnel-crawl; subhuman critters in underground caverns), "High Tension" (the beleaguered heroine spends the last 20 minutes wearing a literal coat of gore), and seemingly every one of the "Texas Chainsaw"s (coming closest to the family dynamic of Part III). While "Frontier(s)" spills its share of the red vino, it doesn't approach the level its reputation would lead you to believe–by comparison, the far more original "Inside" trumps this in terms of jaw-dropping carnage–but Gens instills his violence with such a brutally misanthropic tone that it comes across with more discomfort than catharsis. That being said, there is a bizarre appeal to our protagonists, probably because their initial crime and in-fighting becomes more forgivable in the face of the malevolent menace they bump up against; and the villains are grotesquely charismatic, forming an interlacing network of poison DNA and an undeniable (and undeniably perverse) sense of familial honor. "Frontier(s)" is messy, and certainly no masterpiece, but it makes for a diverting trip into the potential for genre extremity.