Julien Magnat

  • Bloody Mallory (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) The world of low-budget cinema can be a slapdash and uneven affair, but Bloody Mallory is an honest surprise: a film made back when live-action anime aesthetics and genre-blending fun were still new, it has the earnest glee of a hyperactive kid having just discovered blasphemy, manga heroines, transgressive literature and digital special effects. So it is that writer-director Julien Magnat seemingly has a lot of fun introducing us to an action heroine (the titular Mallory) and her merry crew of supernatural-hunting specialists—among them a drag queen, a mute girl that expresses herself by taking possession of others, and a more stereotypical man in black. When the pope is kidnapped, Mallory is joined by a kung-fu-fighting priest to discover and investigate a long-lost village controlled by a vampire. Bloody Mallory is a lot of fun, especially if you’re nostalgic for such fare as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and 1990s Hong Kong action movies. It’s not a good movie by any sense—everything feels slap-dash (starting with the special effects), as if cast and crew were racing to finish the film before the budget ran out and the checks started to bounce. But quite a few viewers will love the result: it’s playing without any shyness with big genre tropes and ideas, defying viewers to cheer along as it goes for the power chords of the modern fantastic. The roughness of the production is almost another layer of fantasy on top of everything else. Plus, it’s French—so there’s another bonus right there. I wasn’t expecting much from Bloody Mallory, but it’s safe to say that it went far beyond my expectations.

  • Faces in the Crowd (2011)

    Faces in the Crowd (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, March 2012) There’s nothing wrong with a high concept if it’s well-used, and at time Faces in the Crowd makes the most of its central gimmick: A woman who, after a brutal attack, can’t identify her attacker because of brain lesions causing prosopagnosia or, in layman’s term, an inability to recognize faces.  Writer/director Julien Magnat has a few good ideas on how to exploit the situation, and the film occasionally turns trippy as various actors are used to play the same characters in an effort to depict the protagonist’s state of mind.  The first hour of the film is particularly effective as it describes an unusual condition and the chills that can come from it.  Milla Jovovich also turns in an interesting performance in the lead role, as a vulnerable woman far from her usual butt-stomping heroines.  Unfortunately, Faces in the Crowd eventually runs out of steam –as much as it exploits its concept effectively, it also can’t avoid some obvious plot developments, and by the time it turns into another heroine-against-serial-killer showdown, some of the energy has run out of the film.  The ending can’t resist a few clichés along the way, including the one where the serial killer turns out to be one of the film’s existing characters.  Still, most of the movie isn’t too bad, there’s even some thematic depth to it, and anyone who has been to Winnipeg will have fun spotting some of the landmark used during the film’s production in an attempt to present itself as New York, most notably the Esplanade Riel bridge used during two crucial sequences.   Faces in the Crowd is considerably better than a lot of direct-to-video thrillers –at the very least, it’s interesting and has one or two new tricks down its sleeves.