Claude Faraldo-Themroc (1972)

Although there aren't many people who would be astounded to hear that repetitious factory work, police control and cramped living quarters are apt to be dehumanizing, ''Themroc'' illustrates this theme with considerable ingenuity. New York Times




The young director, Claude Faraldo, has imagined a Paris proletariat whose speech has broken down into occasional nonsense syllables and emotions are expressed in mime augmented with grunts, moans and screams. The title figure, whose surname is distinctly un-French and may itself be gibberish, is a man of 40 or so who lives with his widowed mother, a sour, silent, disapproving woman, and his much younger and usually half-naked sister.




Themroc, played by the distinguished actor Michel Piccoli, is sexually obsessed and correspondingly frightened by his sister, the doeeyed and nubile Beatrice Romand. He is numbed by his job on a factory's ''exterior maintenance crew.'' It is one of Mr. Faraldo's amusing conceits that the interior crew paints the inside of an iron picket boundary fence while the exterior crew paints the outside.




Dismissed after he is caught peeping, quite inadvertently, at an executive who is caressing his secretary while dictating a letter, the oxlike Themroc revolts. The beaten-down industrial serf learns to scream like a graduate of Est and finds that bosses, the police and everyone else backs away from him. Themroc walls up his room in the apartment and then breaks out the exterior wall with a sledgehammer, which can be taken as symbolic of opening himself at last to truly human experience.




Mr. Farald's inspiration flags long before ''Themroc'' ends. His espousal of urban anarchy seems a bit dated. His notion that speech is as an instrument of social control seems an oversimplification. For all that, the film nonetheless is an unusually interesting example of avant-garde film making.




Mr. Piccoli is excellent, although the very force of his presence detracts from his role as an industrial Everyman. Miss Romand, who was seen in Eric Rohmer's ''Claire's Knee,'' is a placidly erotic presence. There are also brief appearances by Patrick Dewaere and the coyly named Miou-Miou, who is a sex kitten rather than a cat kitten. New York Times




In this alternately disturbing and humorous film, controversial director Claude Faraldo paints a bleak picture suggesting that a reversion to the stone age may be preferable to living the stale sanitised existence which modern society offers. It is clearly a product of its time – the late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of great societal and cultural upheaval in France. This sense of rebellion and the embracing of anarchistic notions made its presence felt in many French films of this period, and Themroc is probably the most famous example of this.




With no intelligible dialogue (all characters speak in either a non-recognisable corruption of French or neanderthal grunts), the film relies entirely on its visuals for impact. Although there is a lot of tedious repetition, there are also some very memorable scenes, such as Themroc’s frustrated attempts to catch a train and the graphic barbecue of a policeman. Also notable is the scene where Themroc knocks a hole in his apartment wall and starts throwing all of his mod cons out into the street.




Michel Piccoli’s virtuosity as an actor is well known, but here he surpasses himself as the would-be caveman Themroc. He does not utter a single comprehensible word but you feel that you understand what makes him tick and why he behaves as he does. (Piccoli is also reputed to have poured a substantial amount of his own money into making the film.)




Nowadays the film is regarded more as a curiosity piece than anything else, a faded postcard from the time when garish tank-tops and simulated anarchy ruled O.K. However, the film’s imagery is so powerful that it should have a resonance with a modern audience. Films de France