The Appointment: the 80s horror film that destroys incestuous fathers is released in theaters

In recent months they have told us this several times Consent it was a great moment in the feminist fight against sexual violence against children through cinema and art. At the end of 2023 we actually saw a little cinematic bomb radical, subversive, embarrassing, provocative and intelligent. However, it was not in front of Vanessa Filho’s film and its detailed thirty-minute rape scenes, but in front of The appointment.

This British film one thousand nine hundred and eighty-one was released in several cinemas. It is said that forty years ago it went completely unnoticed and even marked the end of its director’s film career. And we cannot help but think that if it threw its author into the abyss of oblivion, becoming at the same time his first and last feature filmit’s simply because The appointment East a flamethrower in the face of incestuous pedophiles.

The story of the film can be summed up in one sentence: Joanne, a young teenager, prepares to give a cello recital. But when she learns that her father cannot attend because she has to travel to London on a business trip, the young girl is devastated by grief, disappointment and anger. A spiral of strange and violent events begins to unfold…

A world plagued by incest

In the very first sequence of The appointmenta girl is lured into a forest childish voices calling him. Suddenly she gets sucked violently into her bushes, the body completely dislocated.

In the back, we experiment freezing cold. Opening titles.

We then find ourselves in a music school where there is only young women in uniformwhich is indistinguishable from the first daughter. They could all have been dead. There the camera caresses the walls of the school with tracking shots, it’s very disturbing. We understands that it’s about sex.

Then, a dialogue definitively confirms the hypothesis that the film is a vast metaphor for incest. One man asks another “How can I convince her to give up her dream?” – You can tell her, you fascinate her. – It’s normal that I fascinate her, I’m her father and she’s a child. – Yes, but he must not understand that she is a child. »

What this dialogue is about is the age problem of young incestuous girls, who are children manipulated into thinking they are adults. They are made to “become adults” condemning them forever to the typical dependence of childhood.

Film the hell of incest focusing on the victim

The appointmenthis own story of an incestuous father who dare be afraid once your daughter enters adolescence. Joanne is now old enough to talk. Above all you are no longer passive but active. She stares at her father while her eyes routinely shift or falsely focus on something else. To make us feel the discomfort of this messy family, the film makes us suffer unbearable lewdness of a girl who never lowers her gaze, who always demands and looks more the more her father doesn’t look at her.

We experience the deeply dirty nature of an incestuous father finding himself cluttered by what he himself created. What is threatening about Joanne is not reporting or throwing everything away. It’s much worse than that: she honestly doesn’t understand what the problem is. All the perception of her, ruined by sexual violence, perceives is that her father rejects her. Worse still: she is a burden now that she is exactly as he shaped her in his sick imagination of her and transformed her with violence. This is the story of a man eaten by monster who created, a woman-child which only has incest as a relationship with the world.

Everyone sees, but no one speaks: an unbearable complacency towards incest

Self The appointment it is also radical and avant-garde, also because it perfectly shows the mother’s inertia. While Joanne is far too tactile with her father, her mother watches everything about her but never reacts. She embroiders or watches TV. She’s not interested. This character is the personification of society’s silence and complacency towards sexist and sexual violence against minors. Because crushing the weakest helps everyone. Later in the film she even goes so far as to warn her husband about her, because, “you know, at that age, with the hormones, they go crazy »as if his daughter were a rival.

Ultimately, incest is not a hidden secret: it’s disgusting. Let’s just see that. The appointment it’s not about a marginal family but about incest as a system, as a natural consequence of patriarchy.

Radically reverse the relationship of domination and punish the guilty

The appointment it’s a very kitsch film. The extreme close-ups, the extended suspense sequences, the exaggerated editing effects served in spades. But stretching in all directions a trajectory that we have known about since the beginningit will end very badly it’s not a flaw: this is the real subject of the film.

Because the film is set at the precise moment in which a man realizes that his impunity ends there. It doesn’t matter if it is his daughter who reports him, a court that persecutes him or even his conscience that tortures him: the violence he inflicted, perhaps one night, perhaps years, is coming back to haunt him.

It culminates in an incredibly well-crafted, funny, violent and cruel ending.. The father has a car accident and is thrown off a cliff. Faced with the fall of her father, sucked into the depths of the abyss, the thought immediately comes to the little girl with her torn body right from the first sequence. This little girl, who we suddenly understand was without a doubt a victim of incestas Joanne undoubtedly is, and hundreds, thousands of other children.

As if the force of evil lurking in the bushes (then on the road) was simply the life that stops once childhood is taken away. Why should he focus only on the victims? It can overwhelm everyone, even the guilty.

When the car falls, with the father at the wheel, it does not immediately crash to the ground but bounces off a tree. The father finds himself upside down for a long moment, just long enough for the blood to drown his brain, his eyes threaten to explode and, above all, who observes this total reversal of the relationship of domination over his daughter. We will find her again later, in the last shot of the film, laughing, smiling, satisfied.

And then, in the end, the father falls, weighed down by scrap metal, some apples, forbidden fruits that roll on the dashboard and a lot of guilt. It dies of its own weight.

Add Madmoizelle to your favorites on Google News so you don’t miss any of our articles!