We Are the Flesh (Arrow Films, 2016)
We Are the Flesh Doesn’t Quite Win My Filthy Heart
This is definitely a weird one. We Are the Flesh (2016) is feverish, often abstract, artsy, and almost plotless, but its most glaring trait, what everyone will be talking about, is its transgressiveness, primarily through very, very explicit, and often distressing, sexuality. It can be a difficult watch, and I find these sort of “dare” movies fascinating. (“You gotta watch this movie. She makes him eat her menstrual blood!”) And it is perversely fascinating in the moment. However, I found myself unable to connect on any deeply meaningful level; I always felt one final step removed from euphorically dirtying myself along with it.
The film opens with a strange man (Noe Hernandez) in an abandoned building in Mexico (we are later led to believe a post-apocalypse wasteland lies outside). He joyously makes gasoline survivor-man style, bangs a drum, and yells a lot of nonsense. Soon a brother and sister (Maria Evoli and Diego Gamaliel) wander in from the outside, seeking shelter. What follows is a corruption of sorts: the rest of the film escalates into depraved acts of violence and sex (mostly sex) that the man encourages the siblings to perform. After the first twenty minutes everyone is pretty much nude for duration. We are treated to incest and necrophilia among other taboos. But the acts are not forced—this is the important point. They choose, albeit more unwillingly by the brother at first, to embrace their Freudian bodily desires that to us seem so awful and immoral.
Mexican director Emiliano Rocha might be a madman. The film becomes confused and dreamy as I found myself asking more and more, “What the hell is going on?” The three characters, when not engaged in various sex acts, are trying to transform the building in which they live together into something resembling a womb, with curved, monochromatic, papier-mâché-esque material coating everything (the man literally gives us a monologue on wombs). This leads to an outright explicit birthing visual metaphor I still have no idea what to make of. Much of the “subtext” feels like this: clear to the point of heavy-handedness while at the same time abstaining to add up to meaningful, pointed themes. Later, others suddenly begin to enter their new realm with little or no explanation. This confusion never gets dull or irritating, though, as the bizarre, visceral punches and wrongly captivating (as well as varied, colorful, and inventive) imagery keep it all quite entertaining. It’s also not as if the film never has anything on its mind. Its fixation on all things fleshy at times evolves into a voice hateful of society and the cruel outside world, and the ending seems to be making a poignant statement about modern urban Mexico.
The performances, especially that of Evoli, the girl, are extremely brave and vulnerable. (The script has her character fully embrace the uncomfortable sexual deviancy encouraged, while the brother remains more tentative for a while.) Hernandez’s performance as the ringleader of this demented circus in particular, or at the very least one element of it, will stick in your mind long after the credits roll. His ghoulish yet delighted smile that recurs throughout, wonderfully over-exaggerated, is all at once terrifying and comedic. I feel as if no one else in the world with a different facial structure could have been cast to create such an unnerving presence.
I want to be careful of sounding too negative. We Are the Flesh again entertains and artfully accomplishes the repellent transgressiveness it seeks to unleash upon viewers. I just would never seek it out again, not because I found it too gross or uncomfortable (though I absolutely felt uncomfortable at times), but because I simply could not fully connect. The problems I had with this film were not with its thematic material or its technical quality. For one, I have to ask myself if there is a point at which it becomes pure shock value for its own sake. Is it when we are given extreme close-up long takes of both male and female genitalia (seriously)? But the main obstacle I faced in connecting with the film, I think, was its lack of characterization. Interesting and deeply felt characters, either loved or hated, are the mark of almost all great films, and this hole is what keeps We Are the Flesh from reaching the status of necessary viewing. Beyond a single trait, I would be hard-pressed to describe each character. Furthermore, outlier moments actually break this simplistic characterization of each (“Where did that come from?”), keeping a cohesive understanding of these people and their motivations from surfacing. It’s telling that the film ends with some guy not ever seen before rather than any sort of payoff, revelation, or resolution—even indirectly—for any of the three subjects with which we spend the most time.
It troubles me, though, because I feel this is kind of the point. The film is not concerned with rational social thought, only the body and one’s animalistic urges pertaining to it. At one point, a soldier from the outside is captured and brought inside the building. The crazed man of Womb World says to him that they are not going to kill him for revenge, because they are against him, or even for the pleasure of killing, but “for your blood, and all the fleshy liquids inside you.” Normal narrative motives do not matter here, the film says, smartly offering a self-commentary in this scene, perhaps also a commentary on the entire “dare” movie subgenre. Flesh’s only purpose is that of primal stimulation, to illustrate to us our collective id, individualism be damned. We are all physical creatures, made only to fuck and kill. Or maybe this is part of Rocha’s extreme (and again, muddled) criticism of his own country in turmoil, for that is what the final shot suggests. I appreciate what this film does, and it’s certainly an oddity well worth checking out. I just wish it wanted me to connect with it more.
Author Biography
Zach Villemez is a senior English Literature major at Hendrix College in Conway, AR. His undergraduate thesis is being written on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and he cries without fail upon every re-watch of Rocky.
Mentor Biography
Kristi McKim is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film Studies at Hendrix College, where she was awarded the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shivley Odyssey Professorship, honored as the 2014-15 United Methodist Exemplary Professor, and nominated for the CASE U.S. Professors of the Year Award. Her publications include the books Love in the Time of Cinema (2011) and Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (2013), in addition to pieces in Camera Obscura, Studies in French Cinema, Senses of Cinema, Film International, The Cine-Files, and Film-Philosophy.
Department Overview
Hendrix College offers a major in English with an emphasis in Film Studies and a minor in Film Studies. This growing program within an intimate and rigorous liberal arts college environment includes a variety of courses in the history and theory of film and media, alongside co-curricular experiences (such as this trip to the New York Film Festival) generously made possible through the Hendrix-Odyssey Program. Extracurricular film-related groups include Hendrix Film Society and Hendrix Filmmakers.
Film Details
We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne, 2016)
Mexico
Director Emiliano Rocha Minter
Runtime 80 minutes
Follow this link to read the introduction to this set of reviews: https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2016/12/15/2016-telluride-horror-show-introduction/
