Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ann Oren
Starring: Simone Bucio, Sebastian Rudolph, Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Lea Draeger, Josef Ostendorf
On paper, Ann Oren's feature debut Piaffe shares
its premise with Russian filmmaker Ivan I Tverdovskiy's 2017 film
Zoology. Both movies feature timid women experiencing a sexual awakening upon
mysteriously sprouting a tail. Stylistically however, the two directors
take very different approaches. As you might expect from her visual arts
background, Oren isn't concerned too much with plot, more with
expressing her film's thematic sensuality, combining images and sound in
a seductive manner.
Sound plays a major role in the film, which is something of a thematic
cousin of Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio. Like that film, Piaffe revolves around a foley artist's
desperate quest to find the right sound for a particular scene. In this
case it's the put-upon Eva (Simone Bucio), an amateur who has
fallen into the role after her professional foley artist older sibling
Zara (Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau) was institutionalised following
what appears to have been a suicide attempt.
Eva is tasked with soundtracking the clippity-clops of a horse's hooves
in a commercial for a dodgy drug named Equili. Her initial efforts see
her reprimanded by a tyrannical director, leading Eva to visit a stable
in the hopes of becoming more familiar with the sound of horses. Back in
the studio, Eva throws herself into a version of foley work that borders
on method acting, clamping a bracelet between her teeth to imitate a
harness and moving her legs in the graceful manner of a horse as she
walks around. In a striking edit, Oren cuts from the horse on Eva's
screen to the young woman's feet, moving in similar rhythm at a dance
club.
When Eva begins to sprout a tail, she doesn't seem all that bothered by
it. We've watched her allow herself to be bullied by practically
everyone she encounters, so it's natural that she accepts this as yet
another hardship. With the aid of a stern-faced botanist (Sebastian Rudolph), Eva finds herself in an S&M relationship, with the two
incorporating her new appendage into their sex games, giving new meaning
to the term "horseplay."
Following Jordan Peele's
Nope, Piaffe is the second 2022 movie to allude to cinema's
roots in the desire to capture the movement of a horse. Peele's film
sees its protagonists' lives enriched by a quest to capture an animal of
sorts on film, while Oren gives us a sonic spin on the idea with her
heroine adding a soundtrack to a sequence of images not unlike those
captured by photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the 19th century. The
horse is so tied into cinema (after all, the western became the first
great cinematic genre) that it makes sense that Eva would transform into
this particular beast.
Bucio impressed in her acting debut a few years in the Mexican
supernatural thriller
The Untamed. In that film she played a similarly taciturn young woman who
experiences a sexual awakening at the hands, or rather the tentacles of
a strange alien creature. It's curious that she's chosen
Piaffe as her second role, but I guess she knows what she
likes and likes what she knows. With her ethereal features and ungainly
grace, Bucio makes for the perfect foil for Oren's odd drama, making the
strange developments a little less abnormal with her committed
performance. Like The Untamed, Piaffe is a celebration of sexual pleasure, regardless
of what form it may take, but where Amat Escalante's idea was wrapped in
a compelling narrative, Oren's film lapses into something closer to
pornography in a final act that may test the patience of some
viewers.
