Le Souffle<br></br>Intacto

Mucky, bloody, smelly ? another French fancy

In Britain, where our cinema is dominated by hard-faced realism, it sometimes comes as a shock to realise just how strange are some of the films that routinely get made in Europe. This week, for example, there's a French drama about a teenage boy who rolls in the mud with wolves and a Spanish thriller in which a gambling ritual involves punters sitting in a darkened room, their hair smeared with treacle. It's a moot point whether they just have wilder imaginations across the Channel, or simply a more adventurous commissioning policy. For the record, though, the French film – in a country where you'd think any auteur indulgence goes – was made against the odds, with no TV channel willing to sign up.

You can see why: Damien Odoul's Le Souffle is defiantly uncommercial, and on paper must have looked especially unappetising. On a hot summer's day, a group of farmers have a leisurely lunch and get hammered, while a teenage boy vents his spleen and nurses his hangover. Acted by non-professionals and shot in black and white, Le Souffle is a small, intensely personal first feature, and would be very easy to miss; but it's one of the freshest, most intensely imagined debuts to come from France in ages.

The film starts with a couple of shots that promise a bucolic idyll: mist on the hills of the Limousin region, cattle lowing in the background. What follows promptly disabuses us: a ferociously bearded man slits a sheep's throat, the blood gushes and we hear the wheeze of its escaping breath (one version of the "souffle" of the title). Odoul's film is a realistically mucky, bloody and (if you have the imagination) smelly depiction of farm life, yet there's nothing in sight quite as mucky, bloody or smelly as the mental landscape of teenage David (Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc). A townie whose parents have separated, he's staying with his rough-and-ready uncles on their collapsing farm, whiling his time away by burying himself in rap on his headphones, mooching around in rebel postures, and dreaming strange murky daydreams.

David's initiation into manhood, country style, is the film's centrepiece, a riotous lunch with his uncles' circle, a feast of boozy badinage attended by jovial grotesques of various ages and sizes – a man as fleshy and greasy as the ham he slices, an embittered middle-aged rocker and a beaky, babbling homunculus whose after-lunch performance is the most spectacular drunk act seen on film in ages. In fact, it seems very likely that it's not an act at all, but that Odoul just let the wine flow and recorded what happened. The sense of chaotic conviviality is descended from Renoir, but Odoul also has darker things in mind and knows how to evoke them, both visually and in a dense sound mix (scratchy hiccuping 45s, mediaeval-sounding violins, and an uncanny moment where the buzz of electric hair clippers merges with flies around a sheep's head).

Odoul achieves a convincingly direct line to the weird inferno of male teenage libido. His David sweats, blushes, pukes and rages, and generally comes across as a vivid exception in French cinema, which has a habit of glamorising its adolescents. True, the film shows a strong homoerotic fascination with the crop-headed boy, often seen naked, but then his world is ruled by erotic frustration: he emits crazed rutting cries as he scans a porn mag, and dreams of floating with a half-naked girl (only to wake up in a horse trough with a rabbit on his chest).

For much of its running time, Le Souffle seems a text-book example of an art film in which nothing happens – a rabbit dies, it rains, men get drunk and sleep it off. There is, however, a decisive event before the end, and although it's designed to provide a narrative shock, it's not entirely unexpected. At an economical 77 minutes, Le Souffle feels to a degree like a brilliant short expanded to not-quite feature length, but if Odoul strains at times for an effect of primal rawness, the film never comes across as contrived.

In Spain, meanwhile, there's a recent tradition of making extremely bizarre films which nevertheless hold their own with mainstream audiences: this is the country that produces such imaginations as Almodóvar, Alejandro Amenábar (Open Your Eyes) and Julio Medem (Sex and Lucía). A possible new addition is Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, although his Intacto sometimes comes across as a calculated application for membership of Surreal Madrid. It's a flashy thriller, but with a bizarre metaphysical twist: a young bank robber (moody scowler Leonardo Sbaraglia) survives an air crash and finds himself enlisted into a secret association of supernaturally lucky gamblers. One of their games of chance involves running blindfold through a dense forest until only one contender remains standing: it's like an existential version of Jackass. The survivor then gets to meet the god-like figure of Max Von Sydow, glum as ever in a bunker underneath a casino apparently located on the moon (in fact it's set amid the lunar desolation of inland Tenerife).

Intacto is certainly dream-like in that you can doze off from time to time and it won't make any less sense. The same strain of artificial weirdness dominates as in The Usual Suspects, although at moments Fresnadillo achieves a strangeness of a richer tradition that can be traced back through Dr Mabuse to Feuillade's silent-era serials. Like his gamblers, Fresnadillo comes across as someone who'll try anything if he thinks it'll pay off, and is definitely a name to watch. So is Monica Lopez, who steals the show as a saturnine cop; it's just an annoyance that Fresnadillo has her vampishly pull her gun so often he seems to be sizing her up for a Spanish remake of Modesty Blaise.

j.romney@independent.co.uk