There is a
moment in Michael Reich’s bizarre autobiographical comedic love story/horror
film She’s Allergic to Cats wherein
its extremely unlucky protagonist, Michael (Mike Pinkney) trips on a curb and
falls headlong into a dog turd left on the sidewalk, just hours before he is to
meet the girl of his dreams for a first date, covering him in the literal
representation of where he’s at in life and cementing him as the butt of the
joke in this weird montage of fantasy and cruel reality. It’s a telling moment
that screams foreshadowing, even more so than the singular shots of a cat
carrier on fire that pop up periodically throughout the film.
Michael is
a pathetic everyman with aspirations of filmmaking; he came to Hollywood to
make movies, but is instead grooming dogs in a strip mall, supervised by a man
who speaks of animal grooming as though it’s an erotic or spiritual act. He
creates what he calls “weird video art that no one wants to watch” while he
wastes away in a rented house with a rat infestation. When, at the grooming
salon, he meets Cora (Sonja Kinski), he falls immediately in love and decides
to ask her out – but Michael’s life is determined to make every single
experience a lesson in unnecessary difficulty, and as the film progresses, just
how much of the narrative actually happens and how much is a part of Michael’s
eroding psyche is left largely up to scrutiny.
Animals in
this film are treated as beings either to be revered or destroyed. There
doesn’t seem to be any middle ground for the characters, and it seems that the
same values hold true for its humans. It’s made clear that Michael is at the
bottom of the metaphorical food chain, much like the rats he decides he needs
to extinguish by stealing a cat left for the weekend at the groomer’s and
freeing her inside his house. His producer, an unusual German man named
Sebastian (Flula Borg), refuses to help him fund his dream project – an all-feline
version of Stephen King’s Carrie –
and emasculates him at every opportunity. His property owner, Honey (Honey
Davis) seems unmotivated to help with the rodents except to “go to Wikipedia”.
He hasn’t had a real relationship in more than a year, so when Cora comes into
his world, he immediately puts her on a pedestal, and her face begins to fade
into his unusual, analog static dreams as his perfect woman.
And, in a
sense, she is his perfect match – for she is just as awkward, peculiar,
solitary, and vaguely off-putting as Michael is. There is a strange, sad sort
of comedy to the entire story, as we literally are privy to the complete
annihilation of this poor schmuck’s hopes that there just might be something
better out there than crude video art and shirtless afternoons watching movies
and getting Cheeto dust all over his mattress. They meet for an unorthodox date
and immediately learn what makes them each so difficult to understand, and find
kinship in the wretched aloneness they have been carrying with them throughout
their lives. There are moments of admittedly beautiful connectivity between
Cora and Michael – but they are, of course, drowned out almost immediately in
the horror that ensues once the couple find themselves, at first tentatively, then
hungrily, beginning to express that aloneness in an attempt at passion and
physical closeness.
It’s difficult to say what, if anything, She’s Allergic to Cats is trying to say, as its narrative defies description and its characters are painted so broadly. Perhaps it’s a statement of nihilism, fueled by a belief that life is a parade of humiliations until we finally completely lose ourselves in the noise and static of madness in our personal hells. Perhaps it’s just a farce, delivered in Reich’s music video style, an opportunity to laugh at the constant failure that seems to happen when we’re trying our hardest to make something of ourselves. Or, perhaps it’s just an uncanny movie about how weird the duck boobs in Howard the Duck are, set to a backdrop of ungloved hands expressing the anal glands of various dogs to the music of Jonathan Mandabach in Suspiria colors. Whatever it is, it’s genuinely funny, the cinematography is visually arresting at times, and when a movie’s credits include “Various Rats”, there’s definitely substance worth checking out.
This
oddest of love letters to the underdog – the human who comes in just under the
companion pets he’s grooming – is completely out there, but what it gets right
is its attention to the vague shyness of people who live inside themselves most
of the time. Even the characters who believe they’re somehow better than
Michael are, themselves, walking around with their micro-agendas; there is
nowhere, this film suggests, that we can really go where the inherent weirdness
inside the mind cannot follow. Especially if the rats in your house eat all of
your bananas.
--Dana Culling
