On Vincent Le Port’s BRUNO REIDAL: CONFESSIONS OF A MURDERER

Kamyar Mohsenin

Not delving into the sociological depths of the story of a murderer and the men of law as thoroughly observed in Bertrand Tavernier’s unforgettable rendition of the story of Joseph Vacher, a serial killer assuming himself a godsent anarchist, in the unforgettable film, LE JUGE ET L’ASSASSIN (1976), Vincent Le Port’s striking debut feature, BRUNO REIDAL: CONFESSIONS OF A MURDERER, lacks the driving force of the narrative due to the reduction of the motivation of the central character to his complexes.

Inspired by the real story of an adolescent murderer in the turn to the 20^th century, Le Port’s film does not aim at the presentation of any historical and sociological grounds for the event as it abstracts the main character from the community and confines him in a small world of personal experiences. The psychological analysis does not lead to any thought provoking clues as it desperately relates all the misfortunes to the bad habit of the masturbation – just as heralded by the preacher men all through the history! The film apparently attempts to build up a study based on the confessions and the documents, but never comes to the point of questioning history, truth, morality and justice as Foucault and his co-authors did in “I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother… A case of parricide in the 19th century”.

However it’s not the end of the story since the film finds its strengths in the cinematic ventures director takes in his very first step. The narrative, constituted of the present time in killing, confinement and interrogation (apparently seen from the omniscient POV) and the past, in the flashbacks (clearly reconstructed in the killer’s mind), gives new depths to the film. Starting with the killing scene, avoiding the extraviolent shots, the film opens a window to a crime story with a little shock, but at the end, when the scene is reconstructed by the killer in the details and the shocking depiction of the sudden savagery, swinging between determination and hesitation, CONFESSIONS OF A MURDERER shines a new light on sense and sensibility when a so-called act of insanity is committed. Visually the film finds a good path to portray that it is not the human who is vain, but lacking any relations to the other people and the surrounding nature makes him seem vain and alienated. In order to achieve this, the film intelligently relies on the appearance of the actors playing the main character in different ages. As a matter of fact, the actors are mostly seen as models in the paintings, bearing a vision of vanity and insanity.

K.