At first glance Soused, the collaborative LP effort between the avant-composer/crooner Scott Walker and doom metal masters Sunn O))) might seem hard to fathom, and yet their respective, singular approaches to the dark side of music make this a gloriously unholy union! The album came out earlier in the week via 4AD, and now we also have this eery short film written and directed by Gisèle Vienne for the track “Brando“, off the record. Shot at a 1968 chalet in the French Alps, and following the kind of harrowing emotional extremes that a character in one of Scott Walker’s songs might endure, the film’s odd logic seems to portray a difficult to discern relationship between a mother and son, played by dancer Anja Röttgerkamp and the young actor Léon Rubbens. Unspoken emotions abound in the foggy mountainous terrain, as do aspects of voyeurism and violence, like when Rubbens watches Röttgerkamp endure spasms of remorse/ecstasy thru a window in which he is also distinctly reflected, or later, when Röttgerkamp appears to the boy with a bloody face, supine on the gravel path. And, as if all that wasn’t daunting enough, the French actress/writer Catherine Robbe-Grillet, author of the erotic and sadomasochistic novel L’Image, makes a very creepy cameo to close the film!
