QUEEN MOTHER

LOGLINE

The tale of a young woman haunted by a planet desperate to win her heart.

INTENTION

I wanted to write about a character outside the world, who is part of the human cycle but feels as if she has never managed to speak their language. The meanness of this world, its cruelty, has made her an alien, inexorably drawn to the sky, to death. Through Saule, Young Blood speaks of that state of depression, of vague sadness, of disgust with life that haunts certain women and men. Fiction allows me to offer an eternal and happy salvation to my heroine. Cinema saves.

Through my previous films, I have always played with the horror genre. I like it to slide in where we don't expect it: at the beach with friends in the summer, in the scrubland during a soccer game, ... I like to surprise and create fantastic situations, sometimes chilling, that elevate my characters and translate their emotions, their worlds. In Young Blood, the genre liberates. The vengeful and murderous planet is finally the one that makes fear disappear. The horror, the real terror, is found in what is most real: feminicide, rape, misogyny. In this sense, these scenes will be filmed in an extremely realistic, raw and violent way. I want the audience to be more traumatized by these moments than by the murders that the planet pushes Saule to commit during the eclipses, because they finally belong to fiction, to the genre, and will be almost enjoyable.

The desire to make this film comes from the very idea of staging a planet as a character. A planet is something both immense when you live on it, and at the same time tiny when you look at it in the sky: a small flat circle. I want to film this planet at different scales that evolve in the eyes of Saule as she gets closer to it. I want to distort the viewer's vision, to play with the infinitely small and the infinitely large in order to create vertigo. I don't imagine a planet moving at full speed in the sky, which will be animated in an extraordinary way in 3D, I just see this fixed shape that pushes us to raise our head and that illuminates our eyes with light. Her voice will emanate from her in a distant echo, like a prayer.

The vision of this planet evolves during the film, first a distant and terrifying presence, then mysterious when it begins to reveal itself and finally reassuring and beautiful when Saule accepts it. I want to play with the most primitive codes of cinema: lighting effects on the actors' faces, very simple shots/reverse shots during the discussions with Saule, giving the impression that the planet has emotions, that it feels things through the editing and the Koulechov effect.

I want to tell this dizzying and transgressive love story between a planet and a human in the middle of a totally trivial context: an empty university, a modern villa where young people are partying. The immense love hanging over Saule collides with Jon's toxic love as well as with all the models of man that surround her, who do not know how to love without destroying.

I'm going to film this villa, this party, what happens there as something terrifying. These muscular, virile, beautiful young men become repulsive figures. I will show these men in their flesh, in a very close and sexual way, to tell their ascendancy over the world. Conversely, the relationship between Saule and the planet will be filmed in an extremely modest way.

In writing and thinking about this film, I don't pretend to convey a political statement, I won't allow myself to comment on the condition of women or the climatic and ecological situation of our planet. Cinema is essentially about the world. What I want is for the small story of my character to shake and join the great story of the world, for my story to take the form of a tragic fable by joining the biblical stories that have shaped our world. The planet could be Saule's ark: the earth is corrupted and violence reigns everywhere, a flood comes to destroy men and wipe out this world to create another... here or elsewhere.

SYNOPSIS

At night, a kitchen in a dim greenish light. A regular thud echoes in the small room. A woman in her fifties is lying on the white tiles, a man of the same age is kneeling above her. He arms his fists with application, strikes her face, gets back in position, strikes with great violence. Slight groans are heard and the victim's legs twitch at each impact. The sound of the blows and of the moaning stops, the man is out of breath. He gets up and slowly walks out of the room, revealing the demolished face of his victim surrounded by a large pool of blood. The white furniture of the kitchen is splattered with dark red. The lights begin to flicker.

The edge of a small wood that surrounds a huge, soulless campus. 25-year-old Saule is on her knees, performing oral sex on her boyfriend Jon, who is standing against a tree. Jon asks her if he can cum or if she wants to have sex, she waves it to go for it. He grabs Saule's hair and ejaculates into her mouth. Saule spits the cum at her feet onto a large cracked rock. The white liquid oozes on the rock.

TITLE SCREEN: YOUNG BLOOD

Jon is madly in love with Saule. He begs her to go with him on vacation to his friend Alex's parents. He needs Saule to be with him. She refuses with a sweet smile. She doesn't feel like partying and prefers to stay on campus. She can’t help glancing behind, as if she had felt someone in the woods. Most of the students are gone for the summer, but Saule can't seem to leave even though she just graduated. She eats alone at a table in the large, silent dining hall. Lost in her thoughts, looking sad, she looks towards one of the windows. The setting sun shines a golden light on her. Suddenly, her arm rises and slowly takes off from the table by itself. Panicked, she uses her other hand to pull it back onto the table before grabbing her things and rushing out of the dining hall. As darkness descended on the empty campus, Saule speeds up the hallways, looking around, worried. She reaches her room up a big dimly lit tower.

In the heart of the night, Saule's silhouette under a sheet in her bed. Muffled cries.

As days go by, the campus empties more and more. Saule feels watched, followed. She steps up her dose of antidepressants but nothing changes.  Her body seems to escape her sometimes, she is afraid

It is dawn. Through the window of Saule's tiny student room, the campus is bathed in a strange bluish light. Saule, deeply asleep, is floating in the air above her bed. The image of this levitation is chilling. In the sky, a huge mysterious planet with warm and golden colors sparkles discreetly near the moon. Saule, dark rings under her eyes and looking exhausted, is reading alone in the library. Lou, one of the few students who linger on campus, comes and sits next to her. She seems sweet at first but her words are double edged, it feels like she is trying her best to hurt Saule, all with a large smile and a warm voice. She starts by congratulating her for being the class valedictorian, insisting how great an achievement it is, especially considering what she went through as a teenager. Saule must be so angry with her father, what a monstrous crime! Saule doesn't answer anything to the jealous girl. Lou continues: thank goodness Jon is here, he seems to take good care of her, he's a good guy, she's lucky. Saule wouldn’t be much without her man. Saule agrees, her smile frozen. She is lucky, that is true. Suddenly, she turns around, like if something was calling her. Behind the big library window, an eclipse is gradually hiding the sun and the sky is plunged into a strange bluish darkness…

The next day, the sunny corridors, the empty library, the large campus lawn... A scream echoes. In the deserted dining hall, Lou's corpse lies on the floor, horribly dismembered. Her head has been cut off, her eyes gouged out, she has been drained of her blood like a pig.

Music with heavy bass. Alex, a blond boy, very comfortable, muscular and handsome, walks like a king in the middle of a crowd of young people in bathing suits, each one more beautiful than the other. They dance, drink, dance and smoke in a frenzy. Alex is giving Saule, who has just arrived, a tour of his parents' house. The ultra-modern villa looks almost like a work of contemporary art. Made of raw concrete, without furniture, it displays the emptiness that only the very rich can afford. On the large terrace, an infinity pool of an unreal blue overlooks the sea that stretches as far as the eye can see.

Saule is sitting on the edge of the pool in her bikini, her feet in the water. She is startled when she hears a thud. Behind her, she discovers Alex who has just put music on. She turns around and flinches again when she sees Jon who has appeared between her legs. He laughs, “You see I was right, it's heaven on earth here, I'm so glad you're here.” Saule nods shyly.

In the evening, Alex electrifies the small crowd by shouting the Marseillaise standing on a table and waving his father's gun. Saule, stunned by this oppressive demonstration, has never felt so out of place. She takes a series of shots. A remix of “Ainsi Bas La Vida” by Indila starts. Alex, full of virility and charisma, reigns as a tyrant on his guests, under Jon’s admiring eyes. He leads them from one violent and humiliating drinking game to another, forces erotic dances between girls and boys, ... The face of Saule, stoned and drunk. She observes the stars, lying in the pool. For a moment the strange golden planet appears to her. She panics.

Jon makes love to her in a room. He falls asleep immediately after coming and having whispered I love you. She does not move, does not answer, her eyes fixed towards the black starry sky.

Violent thuds reminiscent of those in the first scene awaken her in the night. Saule softly steps into the corridor. A familiar greenish light draws her attention to a slightly open door leading to a bedroom. Inside, Alex is having sex with a passed-out girl. His brutal blows make the bed shake hard, banging on the wall. On the nightstand, a green bedside lamp and Alex's father's gun. Saule is terrified by this horror vision, she backs up quietly not to be noticed. At the end of the corridor, a sound attracts her attention. She turns her head and outside, on the other side of the large bay window overlooking the pool, she sees the immense and magnificent planet that shines with a thousand lights and fills the entire horizon, monumental. The planet seems to whisper her name. This soft voice gradually covers the banging sound and pulls Saule outside. 

She goes down to the small beach below, both appalled and fascinated, looking at the planet that completely blocks the starry sky as it is so close to the earth. Guided by the voice, she arrives on the beach, walks into the sea until the water reaches her waist. She asks the planet if she is real. Saule’s reflection in the ocean starts moving and looks towards Saule. It starts talking. As if the planet was speaking though her reflection, she answers in a soft tone, with a feminine voice, that she too is an orphan. Her mother was wounded, raped, devastated by men. She heard sobs, she followed them and they led her to Saule “I found you and fell in love with you. You don't look like the other men, you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

Saule is both moved and terrified by this speech. Slowly her body rises, she enters in levitation and is attracted towards the planet. She looks around her and starts to struggle, shouting at the planet to let her go. Suddenly, she falls violently on the sand.

Black.

In the early morning, Alex is swimming naked in the sea. He comes back to the shore, dries himself, puts on a white boxer and goes to the small wood next to the house. He pees against a tree, breathing a sigh of relief. A bluish darkness rises from his feet and invades the frame. Alex looks back at the sky, intrigued. A gunshot sound, a bullet goes through his neck. He collapses, screaming in pain and bleeding to death. A second bullet pierces his lungs, then his stomach. Finally, a last bullet goes through his forehead and comes out blowing up the top of his skull.

Saule opens her eyes, she is in the villa's bedroom. Jon is lying in front of her, asleep in a pool of sunlight. She wipes her cheek where tiny splatters of blood can be seen and lowers her eyes on the red on her hand, calmly. She looks around and then at Jon. Her eyes stop on his erection.

The sun is at its peak. Jon and Saule are sitting in bathing suits on the small beach under the villa, in front of the ashes of a bonfire. Saule smokes, while Jon can't stop talking. He finds her distant, not invested in their relationship, he doesn't understand what she feels. He wants her to be his wife, to have children with her. Saule just takes a drag on her cigarette while playing with the sand. Jon insists she must show that she loves him. He kisses her passionately and lies on top of her. Saule lets herself being undressed and Jon starts having sex with her still body. 

The hand of Saule starts to be drawn towards the sky. The sand in her palm slowly drips between her fingers. A shadow suddenly comes over the entire creek and the couple is plunged into a bluish darkness. Saule's gaze changes. Jon stops and looks up to the sky: the golden planet has positioned itself in front of the sun. He stands up to watch the eclipse, stunned. He turns to Saule but just then, she gives him a huge blow on the head with a log. Jon collapses, his jaw torn off. Saule then kneels on him and hits him in the face with the log until his head is nothing but a shapeless mush. Saule is full of rage, out of breath, she has blood on her face. She is terrifying. She raises her head and watches the planet, which is slowly descending towards the sea, revealing the sun. The light illuminates Saule's face, who doesn’t seem afraid or angry anymore. Her eyes filled with tears, she whispers to the planet that she loves it too.

On the villa’s terrace, some young hangovered boys and girls in swimsuits, sunglasses on the eyes, get up from their deckchairs towards the pool. They come forward to observe the scene, bewildered. They see Saule levitate and rise towards her planet, which becomes more and more immense as she approaches it.

The frame rotates 180 degrees, flipping Saule's body, as if she were changing her gravity field to land gently on top of the planet. “Eos” by Ulver begins. As the planet rises to the sky, a huge shockwave forms beneath it and lifts the sea, creating a wall of water. On the terrace, the young people stare at this epiphenomenon without moving, until they understand that the gigantic wave is about to break towards them. They all start to run towards the house, screaming, except for one of them who remains frozen and is the first to be swept away by the tsunami that completely engulfs the villa. The marvelous planet rises into space and advances into the infinite universe, Saule lying on it, her hand sunk into the golden earth of her new world. She smiles, while below her the earth is submerged by the ocean.

The greenish kitchen with white tiles covered in blood is empty. Water starts to flow from the ceiling and gradually fills the room. A voice resounds, Saule, a child, calling her mother: "Hello Mom, I'm calling you because I’m not okay, it's happening again...". Her mother answers in a calm voice: "Sweetheart, don't cry, calm down, breathe... It's going to be okay, I'm here...". The snatches of this telephone conversation reach us with difficulty, their voices are scrambled by interference. Saule continues in a whisper: "There is a sadness all the time in my head... I want to die...". Her mother tenderly asks her to close her eyes. There is so much water flowing in the room that the fuses jump, everything becomes black. "Imagine the sky at night... A sky full of stars..." continues the mother.

Thousands of stars appear on the screen and slowly begin to twinkle. Soon they form a big galaxy in the middle of the universe. Her mother continues, while Saule sniffs: "I want you to think of a beautiful planet, the color, the size, the matter that you want...". Saule seems to calm down as the extraordinary golden planet, surrounded by her shining lights, slowly enters the frame from below. Saule answers in a small voice "It's ok". "Now imagine that you are living on it, far, far away from your sadness," said his mother. The sublime planet shines in the universe.

Saul, who has stopped crying, asks her mother: "What is your planet like, Mommy? A new planet slowly appears at the bottom of the frame. It is a human-shaped planet, in the middle of stars and galaxies. Adult Saule is standing in a ball on herself, in a fetal position, her eyes closed. Her hair is floating in the middle of diffuse dust, she is part of the universe.

The Saule planet moves delicately and comes to hide the first planet like an eclipse.

The end

DIRECTOR

At the age of only 26, Simon Rieth has already directed 6 short films including SAINT JEAN (2017) and DIMINISHING SHINE (2018), which have been selected and awarded prizes in numerous festivals including BFI Future Film Festival, Beijing International Film Festival, MECAL Barcelona International Short and Animation Film Festival, and FIFIB. His first feature, SUMMER SCARS, produced by Les Films du Poisson, had its world premiere as the only French film in competition in Cannes Critics’ Week 2022. After winning the Grand Prize in Neuchâtel and Silver at the BIFFF, the film is completing its tour of all major international festivals before French release in March 2023.

Watch Diminishing Shine | pw - anaishugo

PRODUCER

After a Research Master in Literary Studies, Inès Daïen Dasi joined les Films du Poisson in 2011. In this multi awarded Paris based company, she trained in fiction and documentary production for a few years before becoming head of development for cinema and TV. She also produces a dozen short films and takes great pleasure in accompanying young talents toward feature or any other form allowing them to express their vision and explore. She currently works with Simon Rieth, Alexis Langlois, Maya Kenig, Marine Atlan, Jonathan Vinel and Caroline Poggi or Victor Boyer.

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By Simon Reith