Lately, almost all the genres of the 70’s are updated through remakes or takes over of updated ideas. However, there is a genre that remains untouched: the “rape and revenge”. Maybe, it’s because of the “rape” side. If today, torture is not a taboo anymore, sexuality is another issue. We know that in a drama, rape is very disturbing because the audience has often the role of the voyeur and there is a kind of connivance with the attacker. This is the case with No Morire Sola, by director Adrian Bogliano.

Four student girls go on a trip. On the road side, they find a young woman covered with blood. She was injured by the bullet of careless hunters. The girls decide to save the young woman who dies during the travel. In the closest lost town called Trinidad, they inform the police about the incident. The young girls realize, a little too late, that the hunters are those who rule the roost in the area. They kidnap the girls in order to do them the worst outrages in the far end of the forest.

Adrian Garcia Bogliano is a young Argentine film maker (he is not thirty yet) who revisits a well-known genre of the 70’s. The influences are not hidden; on the contrary, they even appear in the credits. Among others, there are: Last house on the left, Straw dogs, Thriller: a cruel picture; only big names which make us wonder how the movie will compete with them. In the end, Bogliano succeeds because he dares to show us raw and cruel scenes, destroying the taboos that no horror film treats, especially the “survivals”. He respects the structure made of three parts: mindlessness, rape, revenge. The beginning is rather classical but shows an original settling made of forests, sand roads and lost towns in Argentina. The frame is crude and allows us to see a literal and hardcore treatment of the story. The long rape scene is very memorable because it goes far into the graphical description of the barbarous behaviour of the men. After this intense scene, the survivors collect their thoughts during very beautiful scenes where they stroll about in nature. The movie becomes almost mute.

Instead of taking the ingredients to follow the recipe in every detail, Bogliano allows some digression for his own pleasure. Even if we think differently after seeing the trailer, the editing of the movie is, on the contrary, absolutely not hysterical. The camera runs during scenes which seem useless at first sight; for instance after the rape, when the girls wander in the woods for a long time, completely dazed. The director seems to be particularly attracted by the surrounding nature, magnified by sound effects of omnipresent insects. The sonorous atmosphere is well conceived and alternates inside sounds (breathing, pulse) with outside ones (insects, animal screams, and the wind in trees). More than just entertainment, No Moriré Sola stands back with its topic and tells us that the law of the jungle always wins, the one of the fittest and that the beautiful rivers, the lisping birds and insects won’t change anything. The director prefers the contemplation of a nature indifferent to violence, rather than insisting on the deviant acts of the creeps.

The realism, which is almost like a documentary film, remains in the background during the gore scenes with the effects which are sometimes too “explosive” to be credible. The same is true for the conniving smile of the girls to the camera which allows some distance from the too oppressive realism which would have make the experience really sinister (for this effect, we shall watch Eden Lake). If Adrian Bogliano does not really innovate, he gives here an original movie with a very personal staging which makes him an author and not just a running film maker. Considering the gauntness of the budget, we are more surprised by the success of this movie. Unfortunately, No Moriré Sola, is available on DVD only in Germany and in Japan.

Translated by Camille.

Interview with Adrian Bogliano

First, I didn’t quite understand : are you from Spain or Argentina ?
I was born in Spain, while my Argentinean parents were there exiled, after the disappearance of four of my uncles. In the late 80´s after democracy returned, my mother came back with me to Argentina and I live here ever since.

Many movies are made today, inspired by the genres of the seventies. But the “rape and revenge” genre seems to be absent from this “wave”. Do you agree ? Do you know why ?
Well, i think that, as usual in the last 20 years, for american filmmakers it´s easyer to shoot violent stuff than stuff with sexual content wich is implied in rape and revenge films. If you look the only two intresting approaches to the genre in this decade are french (Irreversible) and japanese (Freeze me). I´m not sure why it is absent in general in most countries. I can only think that most genre filmmakers around the world are merely followers of what is fashion in USA. In my case, I grew up watching those brutal films of the seventies and eighties not only of rape and revenge (with Ms .45, and the spanish Coto de caza at the top them), but also those films of plain revenge such as Death wish, Class of 1984 or Walking Tall. I think those films were talking in a very brutal way about their time. Some consider them as merely fascist, but I think it´s a misinterpretation of what most of them mean.

Was the movie difficult to produce ?
All of our films so far have been difficult to be made. This one was tougher in terms of what I demanded from the actors, but at the same time it was easyier than the rest because it needed less shots, less locations and less special effects.

Any special difficulties during the shooting ?
We made the film in 9 days wich is our best schedule for a feature film so far and didn´t have major inconviniencies. But anyway our films are all made by ridiculous budgets and every thing becomes harder to do. Our first film, Habitaciones para turistas, became a nightmare that had us shooting for almost three years, and after that i realised that i will never direct again if I wasn´t sure that I could enjoy the making of it. So, now I always try to make the crew feel comfortable and I think it easy to notice that, in how much better things result

Actresses seemed to have a hard time. Was that difficult for them ? How did you convince them ?
Well this has a lot in common with the previous question, because I really wanted them to feel relax and not waste their energy but concentrate all of it for the shooting. I usually shoot nudity in the last days of the schedule, so actors are more relaxed and have time to know me and know the way I like to work. But this time i felt diffrent. I thought that if we were going to shoot the rape sequence in the last days, actors will be very nervous about it and were going to give it too much thought. So we shot the rape almost at the begining of the shooting. It took two days and of course each actor and actress worked it their way, some were pretty disturbed and some just focused for the takes and laughed and joked in between. To female roles in particular, I was looking for girls that I never worked with. But I had a hard time trying to explain the tough conditions of shooting and how explicit was what I was looking for so finally, I gave three of the four roles to actresses that I worked with before. And now I can´t imagine a better cast, the were awesome.

I was pretty surprised by the special atmosphere in the movie.  Sometimes the camera just goes on while there’s nothing going on  anymore, or when you see the girl just wandering in the nature. Today, if you make an “exploitation” movie, it has to be fast with always more violence and more sex. But you don’t seem to respect this rule. Is this on purpose ?
Yes, it was totally intentional. My first film was a very classic horror story, part atmospheric, part gore; the second film “Grité una noche” was a mix between a ghost story and a Dogme film, with hand held camera, lots of characters, improvisation and everything was pretty furious; the third film “36 pasos” was directly ment to be a rollecoaster, with lots of blod, girls in bikini, animated and dancing sequences… There was almost everything in it. So this time we decided to do this homage to rape and revenge movies and there is no particular stylistic thing to bound all those films but the fact that most of them were independent movies and of course made on film. So we tried to thought of it as if we couldn´t do too many shots, as if couldn´t be moving the camera all the time, as if we had just a few days to do it. That´s why the plot became very simple, and we concetrate the violent scenes.
The pace not only was a result of using more wide shots but it was also a way of achieving a different type of acting. I used very different models of directing actors in my previous films, such as Dogme films as I said or the over the top style of directors like Andrzej Zulawski. But this time I wanted more like an “unexpresive” type of acting, and I was thinking a lot in japanese movies and the way they talk less and move less, so when they do it it provokes you more. I always thought that mostly the over the top style for the the rape scenes in movies is not effective. And it´s pretty difficult to imagine a situation like that, but when you hear things like a single rapist abusing of three women at the same time it´s easy to think that those women are probably in shock and don´t react to defend themeselvs and scream and do things like that. And that´s what I wanted for the movie also, a bunch of girls overwelmed by a shocking situation, they barely attemp to scream or to scape because they are paralyzed.

Can you tell us more about La Plata region ?
La Plata is the capital of Buenos Aires province, it´s a city of near one millon people, with one of the biggest universities in Argentina. We always shoot here becuase it´s the residence of most of the memebers of our production team and it´s a huge source of talents for its prestigious acting school, and its film school.