Grand Central

In Grand Central director Rebecca Zlotowski examines the dangers of unharnessed power, tracing a spectrum from the simplest to the most horrifying.

Man can subdue animal power easily enough — when it’s the mechanical bull riding contest in the bar. So too the old jalopy, the horsepower convertible, and the outlaw energies of young men, like Gary (Tahar Rahim) and his new friend, the pickpocket, who buy the vehicle from gypsies, another emblem of the unharnessed life. The trouble begins when the dangerous forces are sexual passion on the human scale and nuclear power on the societal.

When Gary goes to work in the new Austrian nuclear energy plant, despite all the training, warnings and precautions, he — and others, older and wiser — are destroyed by it.  His passionate involvement with Karole (Lea Seydoux), another plant employee, eventually shatters the social peace and causes Gary to take on even more radioactivity. The uncontrolled sexual passion and the inadequately controlled radiation power bring him down.

The pregnant Karole rejects Gary in favour of her sterile so suspicious fiancé Toni (Denis Menochet) out of her fear. From Gary’s frightening and destructive passion she shifts to Toni’s security. (This is a sexualized variation on the Menochet and Seydoux casting as father and daughter in Inglourious Basterds).

The Gary and Karole love scenes usually play out in the plush countryside, as an escape from the sterile industrial plant -- an oxymoronic term if there ever was one. However fertile the setting and their sex, however, the lovers’ extremity is frightening. That actual plant, incidentally, was completed just before Austria voted to ban nuclear power. Little wonder.