| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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THEMROC
Rating: 
France. 1973.
Director/Screenplay – Claude Faraldo, Producer – Helene Vager, Photography – Jean-Marc Ripert, Music – Harald Maury, Special Effects – Andre Trielli. Production Company – Les Productions FDL/Filmanthorpe.
Cast:
Michel Piccoli (Themroc), Beatrice Romand (Themroc’s Sister), Francesca R. Coluzzi (Neighbour), Marilu Tolo (Secretary), Mme Herviale (Mother)
Plot: After he is questioned for accidentally spying on his boss making love to his secretary, factory worker Themroc suddenly becomes bestial and only communicates in grunts. Back home he takes his sister as his lover, bricks up the apartment and smashes all his possessions in a orgy of destruction. As the authorities are called in to quell his actions, the behaviour starts to spread to the neighbours in the apartments across the courtyard.
Director/writer Claude Faraldo construed this anarchic French fantasy as a radical no-holds-barred attack on bourgeois values. Faraldo almost entirely rejects any dialogue – which is suitable considering the central character’s rejection of anything more than primitive verbalisms himself – such that the distributors didn’t even need to bother with subtitling or translating the film for English-speaking audiences. There are times the film tries one’s patience – like the lengthy opening that consists just of several minutes of shots of people walking to work. But once Faraldo unleashes his primitives, the film makes its points in much the same brutal but playful way that most of its characters communicate. It has quite an anarchically invigorating spleandour – the long scenes of Michel Piccoli smashing his apartment to pieces with a sledgehammer and throwing all his material possessions out the window have a guiltily exhilarating catharsis to them. And as the film progresses so does its sense of humour – like when the woman across the courtyard breaks out and is cautiously emulated by her meek husband – she joyously bashes with a sledgehammer while he nervously taps at things with a small claw hammer; or the rather charming scenes at the end where the barbarians try to tempt a handsome bricklayer who does his best to ignore them as they playfully poke fingers into his wet cement, before he strips off his clothes and joins in too. While the film is rather ragged around the edges and undisciplined at times it does have a potent rawness. The last freeze-frame image of an arm waving through a bricked-up hole serves as a memorable image of Faraldo’s symbol of the barbarian that remains defiant despite society’s restraints.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
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