2023-10-11 21:53:21
Already in his revelation comedy ‘The fighters’ the interest of Thomas Cailley by the codes of the fantastic. But the French director embraced them with even greater intensity in his science fiction series ‘To life’. And continue exploring them from a very personal perspective in ‘The animal kingdom’ (Official Fantastic Competition), an environmental fable about a wave of mutations that turns a small part of the population into animal creatures. Francois (Romain Duris), married to a woman suffering from the process, embarks with his teenage son Émile (Paul Kircherrevelation of ‘Dialogue with life’) in a new family stage to try to find the solution.
The most interesting thing about the project is its natural intersection of extreme assumptions: the pure fantastic spectacle is joined by the most nuanced social, psychological and geographical realism. “I am very interested the mix of genres, of records“, explains the director in Sitges.”That a film can be both intimate and spectacular, realistic and fantastic, that has action and also more contemplative or poetic moments. “I like that all this coexists, as happens in Bong Joon-ho’s films, which reminds me of life due to its diversity of colors.”
Other, perhaps clearer, references for ‘The Animal Kingdom’ could be Spielberg and Shyamalandirectors who, according to Cailley, “make human dramas that could work without the fantastic element: ‘ET’ would be good even without the alien, but thanks to him it is even better; the story is more powerful.” The relationship section of his film owes a lot, the director points out, to the excellent ‘A Place to Nowhere’ by Sidney Lumetcon River Phoenix, y ‘A Perfect World’ by Clint Eastwoodtwo great works about fatherhood.
More optimism than anxiety
This year, other fantastic French films related to animals, nature and climate have been seen at the festival. There is the example of ‘Acid’, new long by Just Philippot (that of the eco-terrifying ‘The Cloud’), an adventure of catastrophes with fierce inspiration in global warming: during a heat wave, strange clouds begin to throw acid rain over all of France.
It is also ‘Vermin: the plague’, by Sébastien Vaniček, a species of modern ‘Arachnophobia’ about the assault of infinite spiders, increasingly deadly, on a neighborhood on the outskirts of a big city. Like the creatures of ‘The Animal Kingdom’, they are not exactly monsters, but “just another species trying to survive in a hostile and strange place,” in the words of film critic Bilge Ebiri for ‘Vulture’.
Can we see this surge as the result of modern eco-anxiety? Or is it simply due to the emergence of a new environmental consciousness? “I don’t consider myself eco-anxious, even though I am aware that the planet is in very bad shape,” says Cailley. “I have grown older in a world that is increasingly poorer. But for me This film was an opportunity to propose almost the opposite of eco-anxiety: this mutation, this anomaly, causes biodiversity and enriches the world.“.
Mixed sensations
Cailley skillfully plays with the viewer’s expectations and places them in a rich and ambivalent emotional territory. What, at first, seemed monstrous begins to seem utopian. Mutants and spectators cry for the life left behind while feeling a growing hope for what may come. “One viewer, an older woman, told me that at the beginning of the film she was afraid of the monsters, but at the end she was afraid of the men.. “I thought it was a good reflection.”
If there is a final message to the story, it is that we must accept the other: “What I hope is that we change the perspective of what we see. That is why the entire film is filmed at eye level and a lot of importance is given to gaze of the creatures. We look at them, they look at us… I only hope that in the end we all manage to look at each other. I believe that it is possible to look at others, accept the difference and live together peacefully.”
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