It appears there's only one person (Dominique Zarny) left in the world, and he lives in an abandoned church with his farm animals. He passes the time by taking part in such activities as putting dolls' heads onto birds, but the real love of his life is his pet pig, who he has fun playing with when he's not suffering from a bowel complaint, along with his other hobbies of putting things into jars for storage or making stews out of the animals he slaughters for food. But what if he wanted to take his relationship with the pig that bit further? What could he possibly have in mind?
When you're aware that Vase de Noches was more commonly known as The Pig-Fucking Movie, an informal and somewhat blunt title which highlighted the most notorious part, then you'd be aware of what the movie's unique selling point was. Not that this was one long piggy porno, as the actual scene where the unnamed protagonist consummated his affair lasted about thirty seconds and wasn't particularly explicit: the actor was obviously only pretending, but as the old joke (sort of) goes, you pretend to fuck one pig... Anyway, for the most part this was a very nineteen-seventies example of the art film taken to its extreme.
Extremely boring, many would say, but for all director's Thierry Zéno's pretensions to Pier Paolo Pasolini-style boundary pushing, you were left with a film that tried to take the medium to places it had never been before only for most people to say, "Er, don't do that. Thanks." There wasn't much of a plot to speak of, and indeed there wasn't any dialogue to speak of either, as Zarny said nary a word throughout his adventures, which given he wrote the script perhaps he felt he'd done enough by going above and beyond the call of duty for now having a reputation that few would envy. The film's other English title was Wedding Trough, a far less sweary name which gave a better idea of what was at the story's emotional heart.
Some say this is a post-apocalyptic tale as we never see anyone but the man and his beasts, as if the world's population has been reduced to that and no more. Others see it as a metaphor of the fraught relationship between not men and pigs but a marriage undone by the addition of children, as the wife will take away her affection from her husband to concentrate on her offspring, much to his chagrin. Because that's right, the pig gets pregnant thanks to the pervert's attentions, which should give you some idea that this was not a normal or realistic film we were dealing with, if the whole pig fucking hadn't alerted you to that in the first place. So before long there are a few piglets adding to the menagerie, but the man grows frustrated with them which leads to...
Well, which eventually leads to him eating his own shit, which even for a yarn such as this is a twist out of nowhere, though in retrospect perhaps we shouldn't be that surprised. If the shock value was enough to bring you to this film, then you'd probably be thoroughly let down at how monotonous Vase de Noces was, with its dingy black and white look, long stretches of what can best be described as arseing about aimlessly, and a soundtrack which veers from classical choral music to bleeps and bloops created electronically. Although incredibly obscure, there are those who once they hear of this just have to see it no matter how much they have been warned it's deeply tedious, so on their head be it when they find they've wasted eighty minutes which seem oh so much longer, but it was a mark of how far this decade's avant garde were willing to go that Zéno could get a film like this made at all, never mind get anyone to watch (not that it had a proper release in its day).
