"Le corps sauvage" takes the love of mother nature accents of "la morsure des dieux " and tightens them up ; it's almost an experimental movie and might put
off even miss Carron 's most ardent fan .
Religion, one of her recurrent features ,is not absent :the first picture shows the heroine praying in a the chapel where a stag gets in ; later ,she puts flowers in front of a menhir (a standing stone) and takes refuge under a dolmen , remnants of an ancient pagan religion , that of the hero of " la morsure des dieux" .
All that concerns the nature is successful and one feels the smell and the freshness of the forest ;best scene : Diane 's lover shows her a huge tree which existed BC ; it may remind you one scene of Hitchcock's "vertigo" .To live in perfect harmony with the nature (filmed on location in Brittany) , the young girl has given up her studies and is now living with her grandpa. She practices archery which is ,to her, the most natural way to hunt in the forest .
Besides ,the heroine has a transparent name ,Diane (the Greek hunting goddess ) ; to be sure to get the message through ,her best friend is Hestia (in Greek mythology ,she was the goddess of fire, supposed to protect the sanctity of domestic live ); this may seem rather facile symbolism.
If one is to believe the screenwriters,there's the bad hunting ,that of the poachers who live the game dying in the forest ( a strange scene shows the heroine surrounded by those villains ,and later using her bow and arrow against them : a probably imaginary vengeance). Then the good hunters, who respect the nature ;oddly Carron praises hunting with hounds as a noble tradition .And ,like the old stag ,man must know when it is time for him to go.
This bizarre moral might be lost on many viewers ; I found it hard to relate to this Carron effort ,so I won't assign it any rating.