Themroc: The Wordless French Anarchy Comedy

There is a category of film that survives entirely on the strength of one sentence in a catalogue, and Themroc has one of the best ever written: a French comedy from 1973 in which nobody speaks a word of intelligible language for eighty-odd minutes, starring Michel Piccoli, in which a factory worker demolishes the outside wall of his flat and reverts to the Stone Age. That sentence has sold the film to two or three generations of late-night programmers. What surprises people who actually sit down with it is that Claude Faraldo delivers on the premise with a rigour that most provocations never bother with. The gimmick is total. There is no cheat, no scene where a radio announcer conveniently explains the plot, no subtitles to smuggle meaning back in. You are handed a wall of grunting and left to work it out.

Faraldo is the reason the film has teeth. He came out of the French working class with no film-school training, had done manual jobs, and wrote from inside the routine he was satirising rather than sketching it from a café table. That matters, because the joke could so easily have been condescension — the educated man laughing at the prole who eats with his hands. Themroc is not laughing at its man. It watches his morning with a level of documentary attention that borders on cruelty, and then it lets him out.

The premise, kept above the line

Piccoli plays Themroc, a man who lives in a cramped Paris flat with his mother and his sister and works a dull manual job. The opening stretch is a near-wordless procedural of ordinary French life circa 1972: the alarm, the queue for the bathroom, the breakfast, the commute, the clocking-on, the foreman, the boss’s office. Faraldo shoots it in a flat, unglamorous register, and the absence of speech turns the whole ritual into what it always was — a sequence of noises and gestures that people perform because they performed them yesterday. Nobody in the film ever needed language to get through that day. Realising this is the film’s first real gag, and it lands before the plot has begun.

Then something goes wrong at work. Themroc sees something he was not meant to see, there is friction with the hierarchy, and he goes home. And instead of the small, containable rebellion the genre trains you to expect — the resignation letter, the drink, the affair — he picks up a sledgehammer and knocks the exterior wall of his flat clean out, so that his living room is now a cave open to the courtyard and the sky. From there the regression accelerates, the neighbours start watching, and some of them like what they see. That is as much as anyone needs before pressing play.

Why it works: the language that isn’t one

The wordlessness is the film’s whole engine, and it works because Faraldo does not treat it as silence. His cast talk constantly. They shout, wheedle, flirt, argue and complain in a stream of invented gibberish with French intonation, which is a much stranger and funnier choice than muteness would have been. You catch the shape of every exchange. You know exactly when the mother is nagging, when the foreman is being officious, when a neighbour is scandalised, because the melody of French social performance is intact and only the content has been vacuumed out.

What this exposes is how little of the content was ever doing any work. A foreman’s authority turns out to live in the pitch of his voice, not in his sentences. Politeness turns out to be a rhythm. The film runs an experiment on its audience — strip the semantics, keep the prosody, see if anything is lost — and the answer it gets is a comic indictment of the entire day it has just shown you. That is a genuinely radical formal idea, executed by a first-generation director with no obligation to anyone’s tradition, and it is why Themroc still plays to a room in a way that most 1970s agitprop cannot.

The other benefit is practical: the film travels perfectly. There is nothing to translate. A cinema in Copenhagen and a cinema in São Paulo see the identical picture, which is a large part of why a small French oddity built a cult on three continents while more respectable contemporaries stayed home.

The wall as a piece of staging

Set-wise, the film’s masterstroke is that the demolished wall does not simply remove a barrier. It converts the entire apartment block into a theatre. Once Themroc’s living room is open to the courtyard, every other window in the block becomes a box seat, and Faraldo can hold a single wide shot in which twenty lives are visible at once: the scandalised bourgeois couple, the curious young woman, the neighbour who is quietly considering doing the same. The building is the set, the courtyard is the stage, and the film’s politics are delivered as pure geometry. Privacy is a wall. Take the wall away and the class comedy plays itself.

It also solves the problem of scale on a small budget. Themroc never has to cut to a montage of national uprising to suggest contagion. It just shows you the next window over. The revolt spreads at the speed of masonry, and the film’s argument — that the arrangement everyone submits to is a few centimetres of plaster thick — arrives without a single line of dialogue that could be quoted back at it, because there are no lines.

The casting deepens the joke. Piccoli was, by 1973, the great face of French bourgeois cinema, a fixture of exactly the sort of polished pictures this film is grinning at; he had spent the previous decade in Buñuel’s orbit, and would keep working with the most refined directors in Europe for another forty years. Handing him a sledgehammer and a mouthful of gibberish is a piece of casting wit that pays off in every shot. Around him, Faraldo stocked the block with performers from the Café de la Gare troupe, the Paris comedy collective that also gave French cinema Miou-Miou and Patrick Dewaere in early roles — improvisers, not naturalists, which is precisely what a film with no script pages of dialogue required.

The collector’s note

The obvious shelf-mate is Buñuel, who was making The Phantom of Liberty at almost exactly the same moment and reaching for the same target from the opposite end. Buñuel dismantles bourgeois manners with impeccable manners, in beautifully lit dining rooms, at a temperature just above freezing. Faraldo dismantles them with a hammer and a mouth full of noise. Watch them within a week of each other and you have the entire range of French anti-bourgeois cinema in the early seventies, from the surgeon’s scalpel to the demolition crew.

The truer ancestor of Themroc’s scandal, though, is L’Age d’Or, which established in 1930 that a film about desire refusing to obey the drawing room could get a cinema physically attacked. Faraldo is working four decades downstream of that, in a France still vibrating from May 1968, and the thing he adds is the workplace. The surrealists were bored by the bourgeoisie; Themroc is angry about a shift pattern.

For the regression itself — the deliberate collapse of civilisation into appetite, staged as comedy — the film to set beside it is WR: Mysteries of the Organism, which shares the year, the counterculture, and the conviction that repression is a physical arrangement you could take apart if you were serious. And if you want the same revolt with the laughter drained out of it, Herzog got there first with Even Dwarfs Started Small, where an institution’s inmates rise up and the result is a scream instead of a punchline.

The honest case against

Themroc is a one-joke film. It is a magnificent joke, told with total commitment, and it holds for roughly an hour before the escalation starts eating its own returns. Once the block has gone feral there is nowhere further for the escalation to go except more, louder, and the last stretch pushes into transgression — cannibalism, incest — that reads today less as liberation than as a young film-maker checking off the era’s dares. The sexual politics have not aged into anything defensible; the women of the block are treated by the film’s utopia as amenities.

I would also push back on the reading that this is a great political film. Its politics are gestural. It diagnoses brilliantly and prescribes nothing except appetite, which is a coherent position for a surrealist and an incoherent one for a film that opens with a factory. That said, the diagnosis is so precise, and the formal nerve so complete, that the shortfall is easy to forgive. Faraldo made exactly the film he set out to make and never softened it for the audience.

The verdict, above the line

This is one of the purest provocations European cinema produced in the seventies, and it survives because the provocation is structural rather than decorative. Strip a society of its words and you can see its skeleton. That idea is worth an entire film, and Faraldo spends the entire film on it without blinking. It plays best late, loud, and with a crowd, which is how it built its reputation in repertory houses and how it still works today; it turns up periodically in cult strands and boutique-label restorations, and it is worth the hunt.

Everything above this line is safe before a viewing. To argue about where the film ends up, and whether the ending earns the eighty minutes before it, I have to describe it.

Spoilers below

The contagion is the second half’s whole structure, and it is staged as a slow, almost tender conversion. One by one the neighbours knock their own walls out. The block becomes a cliff face of caves; fires are lit; the courtyard fills with smoke and shouting; the class markers that the first act catalogued so carefully are simply abandoned. Faraldo’s escalation is admirably patient here — he lets you watch individual figures decide, at their own windows, in their own time, which is far more persuasive than a montage of instant uprising would have been.

The police arrive, and the film reaches the image that everyone remembers: the CRS officers sent in to restore order are captured and roasted over the fire, and the cave-dwellers eat them. It is played as domestic comedy — the fussing over the cooking, the sharing out — and the placidity is the point. The state, in this film, is not defeated in argument or outvoted. It is consumed, and then it is digested, and the meal is unremarkable. Given how recently the CRS had been clubbing students on Paris streets, the fantasy had a specific and unmistakable address in 1973.

The incest between Themroc and his sister sits in the same stretch, and it is the sequence that most clearly separates the film’s admirers from its detractors. Read generously, it is the last taboo left once the wall is gone, and the film would be dishonest to stop short of it. Read honestly, it is a young provocateur reaching for the biggest available button because the picture has run out of new ideas, and the sister is given no interiority with which to consent or refuse.

The finale is where the film’s intelligence reasserts itself. The revolt does not win and it does not fail. The block simply carries on being a cave, the state carries on being defeated, and the picture stops rather than concludes. There is no restoration of order, no punishment, no dawn of the new society. Faraldo declines to say what happens next because the honest answer is that nothing happens next; the fantasy was the film, and the film is over, and outside the cinema the alarm clock still goes off at six. That refusal is what lifts Themroc above the pile of things that shocked people in 1973 and are now unwatchable. It knows exactly what it is — a dream of the wall coming down, dreamt by a man who had to go to work the next morning — and it has the discipline to end on the dream rather than explain it away.