2019 Film Festival
film synopsis
Set in the gay underworld of 1979 Paris, Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart follows Anne (Vanessa Paradis), a porn producer coping with heartbreak who is thrust into a lurid mystery after her actors, one by one, begin to fall victim to a leather-clad masked killer. With her relationship to her lover and colleague Loïs (Kate Moran) on the rocks and the police unwilling to mount a proper investigation, Anne finds herself alone as she pursues a small lead through dark forests and seedy film sets, encountering along the way a slate of outlandish characters from a deformed ornithologist to a phantasmal, grief-stricken mother. With a pulsing, sensuous score by French band M83 (of which Gonzalez is a former member), the film is both a celebration of ecstatic, unrestrained hedonism and a macabre descent into the psychosexual realm of transgression and the violent reactions it so often provokes.