The first strain of music in Animal is Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’. Appropriate for this sometimes sexy, sometimes poignant second feature film from Sofia Exarchou, which has premiered at the Locarno Film Festival.
There’ll be more pop music as the film proceeds, but it won’t stray too far from the taste of a certain type of European in love with pop songs from a bygone era: Madonna’s classic ‘Like A Virgin’, Baccara’s half-forgotten hit ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, Alla Pugacheva’s ‘Million Roses’.
But these songs belie a film that is, at its core, a horror drama frontloaded with the mundane…up to a point. In the typical horror film, hell is unleashed in the final third. In Animal, what gets released is subtler and arguably more moving.
Set at a Greek resort, Animal is busy with two main groups: the tourists and the people who entertain them. Exarchou has her eyes and camera trained on the latter. We see a leader of this group of entertainers get a group of elderly people to sing the Gaye classic. She directs them to put some more hip thrusts in their moves. It is all merry and an agreeable form of amusement for the tourists, who respond nicely to the song and dance routine.
Soon enough, new groups of people—from Kazakhstan, from Poland, and so on—show up to join the resident troupe. One of them is Eva, a young woman, a girl with sad eyes really. As played by Flomaria Papadaki, a cross between Kristin Stewart and Elisabeth Moss, she becomes Exarchou’s secondary focus. The primary focus is Kalia, the pop singing leader of the dancers, although you could argue that the film’s real subject is the environment, including the hotel housing both the entertainers and their clients.
You could go further and say the realer subject is European capitalism—how it keeps these entertainers employed, but only just so they are alive but without escape. As with waiters who get paid a minimum wage at a fancy hotel, they can never really afford what they serve. For the people who get paid to provide tourists with escape, Exarchou is saying there can be no escape.
For long sections of her picture, nothing much happens. Which is a bit unfortunate. Thankfully, the film has the wonderful Dimitra Vlagopoulou as the hotel (and this film’s) mascot. She is incredibly vibrant and her performance here is the sole reason to stick to this slice of bleak life cinema in the early passages where nothing really happens and the film looks and feels unvarnished.
It probably smells that way, too, if we believe how Kalia describes her lover who, one night, comes to her, perhaps in hopes of a session of lovemaking in a small, stale apartment. He smells like carpet mould, she says. As you can imagine, the air of romance, of sexual hope is immediately sucked out of the room. When she apologises later, she is forgiven without a word. But, of course, she has touched on a repressed dissatisfaction whose name she now knows. It is one of the film’s main turning points.
The source of this dissatisfaction, the film’s conflict, is never explicitly named, but the keen viewer is welcome to engage in psychological/narrative sleuthing. It could be because of the new girl and what she represents: the start of a journey that has Kalia nearing the end with no real avenues to enjoy the sort of escape she is in business to provide.
Exarchou might welcome the sleuthing—and yet, one wonders if her film deserves the engagement. A second time director, after the well-received Park, which also featured Vlagopoulou, she has the sensibility and has assembled a team with the technical nous. But are there parts of the story that deserve more probing?
It definitely seems so, especially with regards to Eva. Kalia gets the full treatment; her neurosis and quotidian existence merge to form Animal’s core. Eva never really becomes more than a silhouette for a young poor person. Her dour disposition isn’t exactly a character trait. And her recounting of a dream is touching, but only in a way that says more about her homeland Poland than about her selfhood. If the filmmaker knows more about this character, she keeps it to herself.
That said, Vlagopoulou’s Kalia is worth the price of admission and maybe even Eva’s elision. In Animal’s equivalent of a horror flick’s hellish scene, Kalia performs the Baccara hit one more time, as she tells a lie about her presence at the resort. The lie is important so that she seems more interesting, a little more like the tourists having a great time. It is a great scene. We watch the character on the verge of teary outpouring; we see the actress soar.
Director, screenwriter: Sofia Exarchou
Cast: Dimitra Vlagopoulou, Flomaria Papadaki, Ahilleas Hariskos, Voodoo Jürgens
Cinematography: Monica Lenczewska
Editing: Dragos Apetri
Producers: Maria Drandaki, Maria Kontogianni
Production Company: Homemade Films
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Concorso internazionale)
In Greek, English, German, Polish
116 minutes
