A Knife Under the Throat (1986)

A French Giallo, well, sort of, Knife Under the Throat (1986) - Le Couteau Sous la Gorge to give the film its original title - was the last film of director Claude Mulot, who died the following year, aged 44, in a drowning accident.  A director and writer, Mulot seems to have focused mainly on adult films, with occasional forays into genres such as horror, science fiction, comedy and thrillers, but always with an erotic twist.  Indeed, erotica provides the background for Knife Under the Throat, as its heroine is a model for erotic photo shoots, who finds herself being stalked by a mysterious killer, who is busy murdering the rest of her group.  Complicating matters is the fact that Catherine (Florence Guerin) has a reputation as a fantasist - the film opens with her, semi-naked, running into a police station to claim she has been sexually assaulted, a claim treated by the police with contempt and derision.  Consequently, her attempts to report her harassment via obscene phone calls are initially dismissed by both the police and her friends, with only new neighbour Nicolas (Alexandre Sterling) being sympathetic.  The police reaction to Catherine, however, seems to be guided as much by her past patterns of behaviour, (which might, or might not, be the result of an actual past trauma - nobody seems to care enough to find out), as by simple misogyny.  Indeed, their dismissive attitude is part of a pattern of misogyny which underpins the film's plot, with most of the male characters seemingly viewing women simply as sexual objects rather than human beings.

The models' regular photographer epitomises these attitudes, with his increasingly cruel treatment of them during his photo shoots - which variously use graveyards and junk yards as backdrops.  At one point he forces Catherine to allow herself to have her exposed breast groped by a down and out as part of a shoot.  Their exploitation is condoned and encouraged by their agent, Valerie (Brigitte Lahai) who, like all the other 'respectable' characters in the film see the models as little better than prostitutes, clearly thinking that they 'deserve' the sexual exploitation and violence they endure.  Also key to the plot is he question as to whether the sort of soft core pornography the characters are involved in actually encourages violence against women, or whether it is merely used as a 'justification' for violence by disturbed men motivated by misogyny.  Early on, the caretaker at a graveyard, who has been bribed to allow a shoot to take place there, objects to the nature of the shoot, claiming that he has been deceived and denouncing proceedings as being immoral.  Later, after poring over published photos from the shoot, he follows and strangles to death a random woman, before hurling himself in front of an oncoming truck.  While this sequence doesn't appear to be followed up immediately, it becomes pertinent to the film's denouement, when the killer is revealed to be caretaker's child, who blames the 'immorality' of the models and their associates for their father's descent into homicidal madness and subsequent suicide.

A Knife Under the Throat falls into that small category of exploitation films which is itself about the business of exploitation.  In this case, the exploitation of women by men (and some women who collaborate in this exploitation), both as sexual objects and to provide justification for the misogyny they disguise as morality.  The genre, it argues, might well exploit the objectification of women and the accompanying sexual violence, but as such, it doesn't cause or encourage it, it merely reflects what already exists in wider society.  Even without pornography, women would be brutalised, (the caretaker's victim, significantly, isn't an erotic model or 'provocatively dressed, but simply an ordinary woman who simply has the misfortune to catch his gaze).  But, of course, being an exploitation film, it wants to have its cake and eat, presenting its audience with plenty of titillating female nudity and gory murders and violence even as it critiques the whole concept of exploitation.  (One can't help but speculate that perhaps Mulot was trying to justify his previous output in some way with this film, trying to place it in a wider context).

As noted at the outset, this only 'sort of' a French Giallo.  Certainly it encompasses many of the themes of the Italian genre but  it also represents a clash of styles.  While there are plenty of the staple Giallo tropes on display - killer POV shots as victims are murdered, black gloved killer, a plethora of suspects presented as  red herrings (is the killer the creepy photographer, the scar faced housekeeper, nice neighbour Nicolas or Catherine's violent drug addict ex boyfriend?), it isn't shot in the colourful style typical of the Italian product, instead adopting the dour, downbeat look of the French policier.  (The dark and downbeat atmosphere created by Mulot, with a muted Paris seemingly drained of all colour, reminded me somewhat of the look of Jean-Pierre Melville's doom-laden, dark and autumnal 1970 policier Le Cercle Rouge). Taking place against the backdrop of a wintry, grimy looking Paris, rather than a sunny Rome or Milan, there is nothing glamourous about the world presented by A Knife Under the Throat.  The main characters might well be 'glamour' models, but the milieu they operate in is anything but, characterised by violence, sleaze and freezing cold early morning shoots.  Clocking in at around eighty minutes, A Knife Under the Throat proved to be a surprisingly effective and sleazy little thriller.  Certainly not on a par with the best Italian Giallo movies, but pretty good on its own terms.  Mulot's very effective direction and handling of his subject matter has left me sufficiently intrigued to try and track down some of his other films, (which seem to remain relatively obscure in the English speaking world), to see whether this was an aberration, both thematically and stylistically.