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VIVA LA MUERTE
(Long Live Death)
Rating: 
France. 1970.
Director – [Fernando] Arrabal, Screenplay – Arrabal & Claudine Lagrive, Based on the Novel Baal Babylone by Arrabal, Photography – Jean-Marc Ripert, Music – Jean-Yves Bossueur. Production Company – Isabelle Films/S.A.T.P.E.C..
Cast:
Mahdi Chaouch (Fando), Nuria Espert (Mother), Ivan Henryques (Father), Jazia Klibi (Theresa), Anouk Ferjac (Aunt Clara)
Plot: Young Fando is unable to understand why his mother betrayed his father, a Communist and an atheist, to the Fascists. He imagines the sadistic ways in which his father and others are treated as all around him the Fascists and Church inflict mindless cruelties.
Viva La Muerte was the directorial debut of Fernando Arrabal – here billed only as Arrabal – a renowned French playwright who would go on to make several other films, including The Emperor of Peru (1981). Viva La Muerte is a fairly crude film directorially – it alternates between good colour stock and dream sequences that seem like a video-recording that has been re-recorded through multiple generations of copies.
The relative crudities of the piece do not however detract from the full-on shock value that much of the film contains. There is no real plot at all – just a series of images that play on the mindless cruelty of fascism and the Church. A man is buried up to the neck in the sand and his head protruding head is then kicked in by the hooves of onrushing horses; hot needles are shoved into eyeballs and the eyes devoured like kebabs; an aunt bares her back and begs the youthful hero to whip her for the sake of his late grandfather’s eternal salvation; a priest shoves the hero’s finger into a fire as a minor punishment; a homosexual survives a firing squad execution only to be dispatched with a handgun fired up the anus; a priest is castrated and forced to eat his own testicles, all the while praising the Lord for such a gift; a wife shits on the head of the husband she betrayed to the gallows as he waits to be hung. There are a number of scenes of torture to animals – beetles sliced in half with a razor blade, bug sandwiches, and a scene where a bull’s body is cut open and gutted, someone sewn up inside the carcass and the giant testicles devoured. There are also a series of memorably twisted and surreal illustrations over the credits (which seemed to be credited to Topor, the Belgian author of Fantastic Planet [1973] and The Tenant [1976]).
Less clear is what Arrabal is trying to do with the film. You are never sure why all the sadism and shock effect is there – it just is. Are the sadistic fantasies in the mind of the boy imagining what happened to his father? Is Arrabal attempting to make some comment upon Fascism and the Church ? If so, it isn’t entirely clear. In some ways the film seems like a dry-run for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s masterpiece of inhumane depravity, Salo or 120 Days of Sodom (1975), which made more clearly a connection between fascism and extreme sadism. A Salo maybe crossed with Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1928).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2000
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