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| Courtesy of Gravitas Ventures |
On an isolated farmland in France lies a slaughterhouse,
only this time the cattle consists of homo sapiens tied up in collar and chain
as anthropomorphic animals (literally humans with animatronic animal heads
stuck on their bodies) lord over them with threats of violence when they aren’t
feeding them scraps made from human remnants.
If you were curious what it feels like to be cattle waiting to be killed
and eaten, Anonymous Animals all but completely conveys that sense of
captivity by switching the roles between man and animal. Broken up into disconnected vignettes, we’re
never allowed to empathize with any of the silent human and animal characters,
instead given a smattering of scenes of people trying to escape capture from
their inhuman captors.
Though taking place largely in broad daylight the film
lensed in widescreen by two cinematographers, Kevin Brunet and Emmanuel Dauchy,
has a soft foggy haze about itself so (save for some shots of a deer head) you
don’t quite see the features of the animal figures despite pointing the camera
directly at them. Much of this resorts
to the frenetic shaky cam which is effective but also, at times, confusing in
trying to tell what’s happening.
Upstaging the visual schema is the ornate
soundscape scored by Damien Maurel who conjures up industrial sounding electronic
sonics that come across as completely foreboding. Then there’s the eerie silences punctuated by
winds, the sounds of a butcher cutting through bones and flesh, and the soft
growls of a half-man, half-bear or horse or whichever other extras were unlucky
enough to get an animal head stuck on top of theirs.
While running just over an hour with elements of a horror
thriller as cultural critique of man’s tendency to carnivorousness, Anonymous
Animals moves at a snail’s pace with zero room for identifying with anyone
other than seeing the fear an animal must feel when facing death at the hands
of human characters. While the film
follows around some of the characters such as a bearded man who is cleaned, fed
and set up for some kind of human dogfight with anthropomorphic dogs barking
them on, it’s very easy to walk into this broad daylight netherworld and
casually walk back out with the film traveling in one ear and out the
other.
For all of its well-intended allegory, Anonymous Animals is
strangely empty and understated to a fault.
Yes there are indeed captivating sequences in what can be best described
as a sophomore effort, but overall Anonymous Animals is heavy handed if
not a little tedious even at what should otherwise be a brisk single hour. No films don’t necessarily need dialogue or
plot to convey their points or to create an experience for the viewer, but one
gets the sense Anonymous Animals reaches for the sky only to close its
hands on open air. Yes it is a promising
start to an interesting French filmmaker’s career (if it goes anywhere) but as
such this is a hollow, obvious message movie which has done nothing to divert
me from eating my next hamburger or steak meat.
Good try, though.
--Andrew Kotwicki
