Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Baptiste Rouveure
Starring: Thierry Marcos, Aurélien Chilarsky, Pauline Guilpain, Emilien
Lavaut
Several movies have successfully explored the idea of animals rising up to
battle their human oppressors, from the multiple variations of the
Planet of the Apes franchise to Kornel Mundruczo's Hungarian
arthouse shaggy dog story
White God. In similar fashion comes Anonymous Animals, an oddity from first-time French filmmaker Baptiste Rouveure,
who has previously received acclaim for a series of innovative shorts.
On a geographically unspecified patch of farmland, the natural order has
been reversed. Humans are now the livestock and pets of a group of animals
who walk upright and dress in human clothes (think of a malevolent cousin of
the dog-headed protagonist of Spike Jonze's iconic promo for Daft Punk's 'Da
Funk' and you'll get the picture).
The film follows two human protagonists, neither of whom ever utter a word
(whether humans are unable to speak in this world is unclear). A young man
is led around on a chain, fed disgusting raw meat in a bowl and ultimately
forced to battle another man in a riff on dogfighting. Elsewhere a young
woman is rounded up among a group of humans and placed in a cattle yard,
attempting to make her mistake before the wax jacket and welly clad furry farmers make their rounds.
If the sole point of Anonymous Animals is to make us ponder
the cruelty we inflict on our four-legged cousins, well I guess it's
successful in that regard. But as a piece of narrative cinema it's sorely
lacking in anything approaching emotional investment. The title might refer
to the walking beasts or the subdued humans, and if we're to root for the
latter we need to be thrown a juicier bone than the one Rouveure tosses in
our direction here. We never get to know either of the human protagonists,
so it's difficult to care about their fate, not to mention that their
oppressors take the form of horses, dogs and deer, the sort of animals we
naturally find cute and adorable rather than threatening.
Anonymous Animals runs for a decidedly short 64 minutes, but
even at that brief length it struggles to justify its existence. Rouveure's
concept - which is far from novel, let's face it - may have made for a
striking music promo, where the need for a narrative hook and character
development is excised, but there just isn't enough meat on its bones to
work as a feature.
On the other hand, if Rouveure merely intends this as a showreel, it
certainly demonstrates his ability to construct sequences that would no
doubt be tense and suspenseful if we were more invested in the plight of the
film's protagonists. I'm certainly curious to see what he might achieve if
he's given a fully developed script to work with.
