To the Ends of the World

Gaspard Ulliel and Gérard Depardieu search for humanity in the tropical humidity of a war zone. An exclamation mark in the radical oeuvre of director Guillaume Nicloux.

Bleeding, twitching, dying bodies lie heaped up in a hole in the ground in the middle of the jungle. Again and again, a sentinel and executioner discharges his magazine. In an unguarded moment, a man manages to escape from this disgraceful mass grave and crawls away into the dark wilderness.
‘To the Ends of the World’ begins like a variation on Arnold Schoenberg's 'A Survivor from Warsaw’. Indeed, Nicloux draws a link here between World War II and Indochina, between the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity. In doing so, he employs a homoerotic aesthetic to shatter stereotypes of genre and masculinity.
The images alternate in a fascinating manner between revulsion and beauty: the jungle of Vietnam loses its lush green vitality and becomes a dark, damp thicket that holds the promise of death. The soft white mist becomes a blue-grey labyrinth in which bodies and souls are lost.

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