Warning: this film contains explicit images

A man is in love with a sow. She gives birth to piglets. He hangs them. Out of despair the mother commits suicide. There follows an analysis of decomposition, the devouring of shit and the man’s death, his body flying through the sky.
Upon its release in 1974 this film caused a scandal – the transgressive accumulation of zoophilia, “infanticide”, death and coprophaghia triggered battles as impassioned as those provoked by L’âge d’or, which would have delighted Luis Buñuel, who believed that cinema in its usual form exploited only a fragment of the deflagratory resources at its disposal to protest and to dream. Wedding Trough can be classed among those most powerful artworks which imprint unforgettable images and wounds on the memory of the spectator. Pure challenging images, mystical, alchemical and psychoanalytical propositions addressed at an obliterated level of consciousness.
The film is a poem without words which both details a passage through the four elements and above all lays bare the primary impulses which bind man to the world and the animals, the latter shown in the equality of otherness. It is not a matter of anthropomorphism, rather of scrutinizing the conditions of desire, “bestiality”, suffering and aggression. As for the human side – represented by Dominique Garny, a mediating figure and an inspired actor who extricates himself from all explanatory psychology or sociology – it plunges us into a regressive and hallucinatory universe cleansed of all contact with reality in the name of a single inner goal, the exploration of the primal abyss. (Jacquelin Aubenas)