Tag: Animals

Animals

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Animals can inflict severe wounds, pain and even kill. They do it with the purpose of feeding or protecting themselves from other species. Except human beings. Human beings are a very strange beast. They can cause physical and psychological damage on each other just for the sake of it. Just for fun. Sadism is the most primitive and precarious of sentiments. Prejudice, hatred and self-loathing provide the fuel.

Brahim (Souflane Chilah) is a 20-something handsome gay men in a Muslim family somewhere in Belgium. He has been in a relationship for five years. He loves his boyfriend. He has never been able to share his sexuality with his family. His parents are kind and doting, yet unlikely to embrace anything relationship outside the established heteronormalcy.

The film opens during the birthday of Brahim”s mother, a boisterous party with numerous guests and vibrant Arabic music. Brahim’s father recites a poem about falling in love with a green and blue-eyed female (presumably Brahim’s mother). Brahim is tense. He doesn’t fit in and hardly has a reason to celebrate. One relative makes it abundantly clear that the family will never tolerate his “choice”. He explains that such tolerance would be deemed an act as subversive as homosexuality: “They would think I like it too”.

This is a Islamophobic movie, which portrays all Muslims inherently intolerant. Brahim’s mother is white. And he encounters the ugliest face of homophobia in the hands of white males around his age. Think about the violence of Larry Clark’s Bully (2001) and the gratuitousness of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) and you are halfway there. What follows is extremely graphic, harrowing and indeed palpable. In fact, the film is based on a actual story, the name of the real Brahim revealed at the very end of the movie.

This remarkable Belgian film exposes the banality of evil in a very clear and concise fashion. It is possible to inflict unimaginable suffering and carry on with your normal life because you perceive your victim as an inferior race, unworthy of their existence. It is acceptable to drink, to laugh, celebrate your birthday, a wedding and even proclaim love and humanity with your hands dirty, having carried the most unspeakable of atrocities. Significantly, one of Brahim’s tormentors is aptly nicknamed “Hitler”. A bleak and sordid reminder of one of the rotten facets of humanity.

Animals has just premiered in Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. A strong contender for one of the event’s top prizes.

Animals

Posted on by victorfraga

The glorification of male companionship has been celebrated in tragicomedies such as Withnail & I (Bruce Ronbinson, 1987) and Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996). Animals, on the other hand, showcases the triumphant revelry between two young women, decadent in their communal taste for fermented depravity. Effortlessly translating Emma Jane Unsworth’s book from Manchester’s streets to the Irish capital, Animals zips with inspired zest, an energised exposition of elastic wit and inspirited storytelling.

Laura (the British born Holliday Grainger, complete with killer Dublin accent) fancies herself a writer, fancifully fantasising through voluminous bottles with the coquettish Tyler (Alia Shawkat). Their thirties fast approaching, the women see little reason to halt their precocious abilities to party, until love threatens to put these halcyon days to pasture. Minesweeping to Alphaville, Laura walks into the enigmatic Jim (Fra Fee), a precocious Ulster pianist whose scale painting conjures composites of satiated sexual desires. Between these silhouettes, a solitary fox walks, echoing the lonely poetry the film displays.

Befriending a musician, Laura looks to the emptiness of her novel, a work which has amassed 10 pages in as many years, at a time when her sister, once a free spirit who put fire to her vaginal hair in the name of drunken mirth, has gifted their parents a darling grandchild. Beside her stands Tyler, bohemian in outlook and lifestyle, hiding her mournful tears for a parent behind copious amounts of drugs and beer.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the film works with cocaine speed, on cocaine ethics and cocaine rhythms, each shot more unsettling than the last. A communal poetry reading soon turns carnal, with powdered implements entering holes holier than nostrils, while a communal familial dinner is noted for some choice opinions on infertility. Tyler, proudly seeking pleasures from the world outside convention, turns to rhetoric to detail her every life. She chides her friend through an assemblage of wedding dresses as a bastion for idiotic men, while Laura prides her feminism on bringing modernity to the traditional wedding.

Animals is proudly liberal in its outlook. In a telling moment, Laura invites her fiancé to decide what to do with his body. The film makes use of both posteriors, Tyler walking to them with wine glasses to find her best friend in flagrante delicto beside a red brick wall.

Yet the film’s most intimate scenes concern the two women. Whether bed bound in conversation, rebounded in romantic interests or surrounded by Beatnik literati, the two saunter the Irish city with the contentment of deep friendship, one living through art, the other hoping to catch it. It really doesn’t get much better than this!

Animals is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 2nd. On VoD in April 2020.

Animals is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.