World premiere review of Justine (Mexico - 2022), an extreme erotic film inspired by the novel "Justine or the misadventures of virtue" (1791) by the famous Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, a French writer among the most discussed and most enigmatic figures in history.
Justine is an international exclusive TetroVideo and will be distributed by the label soon.
Directing this searing film is the young Mexican Alex Hernández, already the author of the shocking Blood For Flesh and The Prosperity of Vice, the latter featured in the extreme anthology Dark Web XXX.
Like the aforementioned films, the Justine is presented by Domiziano Cristopharo (Xpiation, Nightmare Symphony).
Alex Hernández knows how to portray brutal visions of horror, making films that remain memorable for the ruthless spectacularization of pain, a state of suffering sewn to life.
With Justine, this time the director draws on the poetics of terror of the Divine Marquis, considered the despiser of laws and morals, whose main novels are an unceasing interweaving of pleasure with the cruelest tortures and torments, in which the victim is spared only to prolong the wait for irreparable torment.
De Sade's work is a portrait of the deviances to which morality, that of the instincts, can be led by the obligations and false and superficial constraints of collectivity. The writer's sexual temperament, tending to excesses and cruelty, led him to let himself go, exceeding, thus, in descriptions of all kinds of violence and perversion. Themes, the latter, dealt with perfectly and skillfully by Alex Hernández, who outlines, with incredible staging, Sadian eroticism accompanied by its sexual psychopathies and cruelties.
Divided into four acts, the film tells the story of Justine, a teenager who tries to preserve her virtue but, once hired as a maid in Dr. Rodin's house, the young woman will succumb to vice. Evil and obsessed with virginity, the man will turn her into a willing victim of the most heinous and merciless pleasure-driven tortures.
Justine opens immediately with a shock real sequence with, in the foreground, a postpartum vaginal laceration while a narrator's voice sheds light on human nature in which blood and violence coexist, not only during the individual's birth and growth but also in the act of intercourse itself.
The story focuses on the protagonists' lifelong sickness of living, locking them into a twisted dimension of submission and pain.
In the novel and the film, Justine is a virtuous girl where "virtue" stands for virginal purity. For the initiator of the roman noir, the young woman is not regarded as a human being, demonstrating the pessimistic thesis about the consequences of virtue.
Alex Hernández traces the Sadian female character by placing at her side Dr. Rodin, whose sublime taste for terror is triggered by a constant search for a perverse and morbid pleasure from which spring various paraphilias that almost lead him to be the personification of the Divine Marquis' work.
Giving the faces of the victim and executioner are Dan Zapata and Enrique Diaz Duran, respectively, who give the audience an impressive performance.
In the first act, the director foregrounds sadism, a term derived precisely from the aristocratic De Sade, triggering a sexual activity dominated by evil, achieved through cruelty. In this hell in which arousal is purely sadistic in nature, Justine lives with submission, amid insults and humiliation, shocking experiences including, the least invasive, a forced induction of vomiting.
In the second act, the beauty of the images and cinematography that mark this profound extreme film bring to mind the spectacularity of Caravaggio's paintings as the flagellation, an act of bodily punishment typical of Sadian work, is performed.
Uncensored, Justine abounds in full nudity and close-ups to female private parts, especially during the Doctor's experiments where, in the most truculent moments, successful practical effects are to be appreciated.
The story continues with a parenthesis on poetry and religion, and then focuses on omnipotence. A feeling that drives the executioner to equal himself to God through cruelty, and then results in incest and, in order to enjoy even death, necrophilia. In this regard, the immoral act that precedes and accompanies the necrophilic act reaches very high levels of horror and disgust, thanks also to the successful practical effects.
With Justine one witnesses an impressive eroticization of other people's pain and one's own accompanied by an escalation of horrors rooted in the deviation of love. Masterfully written, directed and acted, the film well reflects Sadian eroticism and thus the poetics of terror in which the violence of the passions, including the callousness of death, elevates to omnipotence.
Wrapped in a distinct directorial and photographic elegance (Dante Belmont) that reaches even to the costumes (note the ruff, an aristocratic pleated collar in use from the 16th to 17th centuries) and soundtrack (classical music), Justine is a concentration of sadism, transgressions and violence, a true homage to the Divine Marquis' literary work.
Immoral and irreverent, Justine turns out to be one of the best extreme films ever made, an exemplary foray not only into the extreme subgenre that usually overlooks cinematography, acting, and soundtrack but also into the world of sadomasochism with surprising and endless repetitions of savagery and lust.
The cast includes Dan Zapata, Jacqueline Blanca Bribiesca, Enrique Diaz Duran, Juan Manuel Martinez, and Marisela Plaza.
The screenplay, on the other hand, is by Alex Hernández himself in collaboration with Juan Manuel MartÃnez.
Justine Is produced by TetroVideo.
