Like scènes à faire that should absolutely not be faites, there are inescapable questions which just should not be asked. With Détruire, Dit-Elle [Destroy, She Said], the fatal question is 'What's it all about?' It is reasonably easy to say what happens, up to a certain point…. In an extraordinary final scene [three characters] … plan a little visit, and listen to sounds and music, signalling the approach of some great, but welcome, perhaps even necessary, destructive force through the surrounding forest. Legitimate, obviously, to wonder who or what they are, what, if anything, they represent, what the forest, the famous view no one can ever find, the sounds in the final sequence, may signify. But fatal to expect any clear, unequivocal answer, and to make 'understanding' on this level a condition of accepting the film. It works—and powerfully, hauntingly—in quite another way: as a...