THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
By seeking a return to “goat kingdom”, The Animal Kingdom presents all the trappings of an ecological fable… This is how the geographer Elisée Reclus nicknamed Europe in the 19the century, before it was deserted by wild animals after nine thousand years of intensive exploitation.
By projecting us into the Landes de Gascogne forest, where man learns to cohabit with the animal that emerges within him, Thomas Cailley’s anti-speciesist film remains lucid on the difficulties of our rewilding. And all this results in broken wings and broken noses.
However, this marvelous work, presented at the opening of Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, does not treat the hybridization of man with animals as a simple topic in the spirit of the times, but uses it as a a catalyst which allows it to be at the crossroads of several paths: ecology of course, but also societal, economic and intimate themes, such as racism, downgrading, family solidarity, filiation, the transition to adulthood .
Strange virus
At the origin of this Kafkaesque metamorphosis, there is a strange virus which gradually transforms men into curious beasts, each having something to do with a different species. We are grateful to the director for not having bothered with the Big Bang of the epidemic, preferring from the first scene immersion, in a traffic jam. An ambulance begins to shake until out of its back door comes a man who frankly looks uncomfortable with his golden eagle wings. “What a time! », we hear among motorists, who seem to find this more or less normal. Among them, François (Romain Duris) and his son Emile (Paul Kircher), aged 16, who will soon be affected.
The Animal Kingdom follows in the wake of another French film, which exposed a teenager to animal impulses and intense savagery. This fantastic cinema, more or less gory, exploring in a climate of ecological emergency the relationships of young people with nature, provides a happy alternative to the numerous documentaries on permaculture. In teddy (2020), by brothers Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma, a 19-year-old young man transformed into a werewolf in the Pyrénées-Orientales of France.
However, unlike full moon evenings when everything happens suddenly, The Animal Kingdom dissects Emile’s slow mutation with meticulous attention to detail: the appearance of tufts of hair, the change in taste, his brand new indifference to chips, his imbalance on two feet… By giving flesh to this evolution, the film composes implicitly an allegory of secrecy in which the adolescent learns to be a beast, in his own corner, for fear of being rejected. There is something very true here that is said about the modesty of a young man. We remember this scene in which François finds piles of small claws stuck among the hair blocking the sink siphon. We are not far from the father who discovers cigarette butts in a planter or a condom in a trash can.
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