A few years ago, a baby was born to Susanna (Florence Mezzara) and she named him Alexander (Jeremy Chabriel), but he was brought into a world that was falling apart and where people needed guidance. Into this vacuum stepped Gregori (Vincent Cassel), and for his small community of which he was the leader he told his coterie of wives and children how to live their lives, though that came at a price. He could protect them, and they spent almost all of their time locked up in an urban hideaway so nobody could get at them, also probably so that nobody could go against Gregori's word which was their law, but he had to fund their conditions somehow as they needed to eat and the garden was not enough…
A very strange, oddly opaque drama that might have taken place sometime in the future or may be intended to be set in the present – the locations of dilapidated buildings looked authentic enough – Partisan was assuredly not a crowdpleaser, but what it was demonstrated how a film about a cult may well find a cult audience, simply thanks to the interest some have for watching a microcosm of society that has somehow gone very wrong. Cassel was excellent as the leader who throws up all sorts of questions the director Ariel Kleiman and his co-writer Sarah Cyngler, making their feature debuts, were unwilling to answer, leaving the viewer forced to take it for granted that they had a message to impart if you could discern it.
But don’t feel too bad if you reached the end of the story and were left wondering what the hell that was all about, for you were not alone, and merely getting an impression of what amounted to a parable of sorts was enough, as this was more a mood piece overall. With a very fine electronic soundtrack from Daniel Lopatin that only added to the unease and sense of watching a world that was both recognisable and alien depending on the characters’ interactions, it was Cassel who took the reins when it came to guiding us through the atmospheric environment Kleiman concocted as we judged how we should react by the way he reacted. Not that Gregori is worth looking up to, as often our responses were prompted to be the opposite of how he behaved.
Mostly that was down to Gregori’s concept of what was reasonable for a child to do, which was mainly to worship him, rewarded with the very twenty-first century confidence builder of becoming a celebrity. This was not, naturally, a celebrity in the wider world, but in the small community they were growing up in, largely implemented with karaoke that served as a prize for doing Gregori’s will, a small item of satire in a film that was careful to conjure up its own society apart from what we would recognise as normal. But while that was fair enough, children need to be entertained and given a boost just like adults do, perhaps even more so, when the leader supplemented their lifestyle with cash from performing hits, it wasn’t necessarily the karaoke he meant.
Nope, Gregori made his charges into trained killers to make money. We only see Alexander (an assured, sympathetic but disquieting performance from Chabriel) doing this, but it’s enough to unsettle as we have to assume he has no concept of the rules of morality he is breaking, and like the other kids, not knowing any better thanks to their father figure’s tutelage means his innocence is being betrayed and twisted. But then a new woman arrives in Gregori’s harem, and she has a young son named Leo (Alex Balagasnskiy) whose severe fringe indicates he is a misfit who will not comply with the leader and in some cases, knows more about the basics of life than he does. Alexander is intrigued, and thus begins his awakening to realise Gregori is not the benevolent dictator he always believed, so you know a confrontation will occur before long. That this was approached in the same vague, non-specific manner as the rest of it continued to bring up questions after the credits had rolled, and for too many this would be a drawback, but if you didn’t want your films spelled out for you, the eerie Partisan came recommended.
