If you must tell someone about a film, then perhaps say something original? No tedious 'saying of the plot'?
(If you haven't seen it.) Harel's Extension Du Domaine De La Lutte is an articulate and acid-clear portrayal of one of the male conditions: the predicament of the male who is not chosen. The predicament of unchosen men in a society constructed by Harel where women are approached and who therefore become the 'choosers'. How relevant to reality the movie is - remains a moot point; not least dependent on what race and what culture you live amongst, and one that audiences will dwell on. How many men are, sometimes temporarily sometimes permanently, in this predicament? Extension Du Domaine De La Lutte is a movie that can discomfort men while at the same time amuse them for it is made with some mordant humour (two blokes keeping one another company on Christmas Day by listening to carols on the car radio in a multi-storey car-park - Oh the horror!). This is no great drama that crashes onto the world stage: rather is it an uncomfortable story that is always there being played out in the corner.
Perhaps there are two things worth saying: one of them off-film and the other one on-film. The protagonist in Extension Du Domaine De La Lutte has three 'voices'. He speaks his dialogue as he acts out his story; in addition to that he comments in voiceover on his story; and on top of that a third, anonymous, narrator comments on this story of his. And once this device has been watched, surely most audiences would agree that indeed this was the best way to go about the story? The ruinous predicament that this film unpacks is the predicament of those men whom very few wish to take to bed. Surely, there is a mordant humour to giving so much (three voices) to a protagonist who is given so little elsewhere? And doesn't the same mordant humour notice that three voices, somehow, further isolates such an unwanted protagonist? He is unwanted not in one but in three guises! And what better idea can there be to pile on the pain and to then add a fourth differently-angled but similarly hopeless voice (the still plucky Tisserand)? Oh the comedy of jokey cruelty!
Tisserand's voice. In Extension Du Domaine De La Lutte Tisserand's voice differs from the protagonist's voice, adds to it, and fills out the male predicament. Though the two men are the unchosen, aren't they different from one another? Tisserand continues to try, doesn't he, despite his predicament being horrific (or because it is so, perhaps). "Sometimes I feel like ( - ) a frog . . . in a jar. ( - ) Bloody hell. I'm 28 years old and still a virgin." The one tries still, and the other does not. The protagonist is resigned. As he says - "There was no solution."
The narrator's voice. Harel can make these four voices play off one another. Surely the nicest example is that of the darkly comic narrator at one point. The protagonist reveals to his audience the desperate horror of his situation and yet, he tries to convince us, it's not so bad; it's possible to deal with this 'bad hand' should you be dealt one; it's possible as he puts it "To settle into a relatively painless boredom." Deliciously, the anonymous narrator is right on hand to correct matters. "Nouvelle erreure . . ." I hope that we are allowed to laugh out loud on our first taste of this film, else I might be prompted to feel just a tad unkind.
The 'real' voice. The protagonist's 'actual' voice is particularly articulate when called upon to make his friend 'see' more clearly isn't it. "You'll never be a girl's erotic dream." he explains. "Get used to it. It's not for you." (Off-movie - smothering the uncontrolled sniggering for one moment (detention at the back) isn't this, in fact, quite an insightful comment once it's been dug over - it's likely that half of men are nobody's erotic dream; that is not why women marry us, often?) "Even if you managed to get women now . . . which I frankly doubt . . . it wouldn't be enough. ( - ) You'll always mourn the teenage loves you never had. ( - ) That's how it is." (All to the background of the heavily ironic song 'I'm not in love'.) Double detention if you don't wipe that smirk off your face.
The voiceover's voice. In Extension Du Domaine De La Lutte the protagonist in voiceover allows Harel to clarify some of the blur - reflected in his window - of a stationary hero with disinterested apartment-block dwellers across the way, a silent hero yet one who is still allowed to speak. Isn't it this hero in voiceover who erects for an audience a perceptive understanding of this predicament? The protagonist has a health scare, believes one evening that he is suffering the early stages of a heart event, and he is surprised by the event for he's not even got started on life yet. As the voiceover sees it - "I'd lived so little, I'd imagined I'd never die." Later the voiceover points out that "A life can be both empty and short." And he says of his situation - "Late at night, revulsion becomes inevitable. Horror has its own schedule." It's in the middle of the film that the voiceover is at his most articulate. He grants us an analogy: "Clearly in our society . . . sex is another form of segregation. ( - ) Just like economic liberalism (and for the same reasons). Sexual liberalism created a class of paupers. ( - ) It is just as ruthless. ( - ) Some people make love every day. Others five or six times in total, or never. ( - ) The stress and strain are huge."
The male/female divide is important in Extension Du Domaine De La Lutte, isn't it. We see this world as these two men see it, and to them these waitresses, and party-types, and receptionists, all seem confident and carefree and the work colleagues wishing them 'Good- morning' in the office corridors seem practically perky. That's how it often looks. And cleverly, haven't the women been chosen for their ordinariness, and aren't they the kind of women who might be living across the way seen through the blurred windows in those unfriendly apartment blocks and who pay them no heed? And isn't the point just this - that these women are not idealised women, not fantasy women whom they could reasonably expect to reject them, rather are they the all to painfully real women whom they should rely on? The stripper's dance at the beginning of Extension Du Domaine De La Lutte is a peculiarly ugly jerking and the actress herself is refreshingly real, she is meaty, a bit raw; and the waitresses have chopped hair and muscly thighs just like real approachable women. Isn't the point that even these women, the unidealised, in other words the attainable women, even these women turn out to be unattainable after all? Oh the delicious cruelty of some comedy.
(Off-film.) Obviously some men, and fewer women (perhaps?), walk the streets of the sexual free-market, rarely chosen, for decades long. Why don't they do something about the market? Well first off, surely they'd be unwise to close down the free-market wouldn't they? They could dismantle the free-market and impose in its place anything controlled by elders, by family, or by government (arranged marriages, fundamentalist Islam, old Royalty, and all the others). But surely that's to oppress and the resultant pairings are in any case, no achievement. Men such as The Protagonist and Tisserand cannot get rid of the sexual free-market - but they can refuse to play it. Men can use resources to develop artificial yet satisfying 'partners' (advanced robotics and the recent enormous leap in Artificial Intelligence), and there already exist various ways to fatherhood. Yet they don't do it. Well when does the number of men ready to 'be above' the market reach critical mass?
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