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What would films be without difficult, cold, difficult, dispensable women? This is one of the takeaways from director Dominik Moll’s “Only the Animals,” a sarcastic French puzzle about a disappearing woman. Its disappearance arouses the usual interest; It helps that he is white and rich. There’s a police investigation and news reports and plenty of pain and suffering, but the many tears that the movie violently pumps aren’t necessarily shed on it.
Installation is pretty simple; What it is is more complex. (Moll and Gilles Marchand wrote the screenplay based on a novel by Colin Niel.) When an empty SUV is found on a deserted country road, the police open an investigation and start searching for their driver, Evelyne (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). Kim is staying at a nearby vacation home. As the search continues, potential customers are tracked and locals are interviewed. The oddity here is that the story doesn’t focus on the investigation or even Evelyne, but on the five characters who contribute in some way to her disappearance and orbit directly or very tangentially. Some know him intimately; others do not know him at all.
The film follows these five episodes as they embrace their own perspectives and dive into their bleak, economically fragile lives. The film opens with Alice (Laure Calamy, one of the best films of the French television show “Call My Agent!”), who knows almost nothing about Evelyne except what appears in the news. Like everyone else in this movie, Alice is largely defined by her problems, and as such, she has too many unpleasant men in her life. Calamy’s restless physicality and emotional transparency do a lot for the character, and when Alice walks into a room it wakes her up even though she has no idea what’s going on inside. You miss that energy when you’re not on that screen.
The other most recognizable human figure in the movie is Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a young, doll-faced waitress whose relationship with Evelyne helps focus the missing woman. This episode isn’t entirely believable, and Marion’s naivete is more narratively relevant than persuasive, but her raw desires and vulnerability are a salvation from the film’s petty and otherwise free-floating cruelties. The remaining episodes focus on men who, together, paint a brutal, at times pathological picture of masculinity the film doesn’t care about or recognize. The first has deep psychological problems; the second is a fierce fantasist; and the third is a hopeless swindler.
Telling a story from multiple perspectives is a familiar strategy: it builds on different narrative perspectives, such as “Citizen Kane”, “Rashomon” and the recently released “The Last Duel.” Different sounds and memories can be deployed in a meaningful way; they can also be just plain fun, flashy or banal. Much depends on how and why they line up in a story, whether they create consensus or conflict, and how they work with the timeline. In “Kane,” the summary of the protagonist’s life unfolds piecemeal with the memories of some who knew him; In “Rashomon,” the same event is narrated by the characters (including the dead) who add their own interpretations of what is going on.
On the contrary, in Only the Animals, multiple perspectives are a clever, self-satisfying tool for presenting stale goods and familiar ugliness with a soup of vulgar class politics. As the central cipher – the sacrificial lamb or the criminal bourgeois, you decide! — the charismatic Bruni Tedeschi makes a predictably solid impression, which is impressive given the steaminess of his role. The movie doesn’t deserve the actor, but his attitude towards his character is instructive. This is especially true for the episode where Evelyne is brutally attacked, an attack that Moll goes on long enough to get close enough that you can see both her horror and the movie’s disdain for this woman.
Animals Only
Not rated. In French and Nouchi, with subtitles. Duration: 1 hour 57 minutes. In movie theaters.
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