“Outrages”, the demystifying mirror of Brian De Palma

Yes Outrages remains one of the strongest films ever made on the Vietnam War, and even on the war itself, it is because it aims directly at the heart of its illegitimacy and its dread. By retracing, according to a striking report by journalist Daniel Lang published in 1969 in the New Yorker, the kidnapping and martyrdom of a Vietnamese villager (Thuy Thu Le, overwhelming) by a GI patrol, Brian De Palma does not go four ways: war is rape and rape the true face of war, where, in the shadow of official history, his iniquitous program of domination and degradation is being accomplished.

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The collector’s edition that Wild Side devotes to the film in a voluminous box set includes its two versions, one of which is director’s cut longer than ten minutes, as well as an album bringing together many rare set photographs. The book, signed Nathan Réra, author of an investigation into the shooting (Outrages. From Daniel Lang to Brian De Palma, Deep red, 386 pages, 28 euros), also returns to the incomprehension caused by the film on its release, its disastrous reception, the anger of the veterans’ associations, and the raw wound that remained for its director. De Palma, who was not in his thirties at the time of the events, recorded there the great anger of his generation, firmly opposed to the Vietnamese intervention. Outrages held out to America a brutally demystifying mirror, not in the form of a firebrand, but on the contrary of an absolute tragedy, from which everyone comes out of their own humanity.

Sometimes perceived as an inconsistent formalist, De Palma here employs his virtuoso art to weave a whole bundle of glances around crime, the act itself being diffracted by the degrees of complacency of each. Faced with a Sean Penn as a mad dog sergeant, gorged with violence and frustration, Michael J. Fox, as a private, opposes a refusal to comply, which will not however save the young woman from collective mischief. His gaze, around which the whole film revolves, is that of a powerless conscience, tied up by the code of conduct and hierarchical channels, but which, although definitively tainted, will remain until the end faithful to the memory of the victim. Carried by a splendid sorry score by Ennio Morricone, Outrages remained this hard film, but necessary, in that it places us on the edge of the abyss, facing the final outrage of “Unwritten laws” that Sophocles’ Antigone was already denouncing. A point of no return for the entire human community.

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