Already in the comedy of revelation ‘Warriors’ interest Thomas Cailley with fantastic codes. However, the French director adopted them even more intensively in his science fiction series. ‘Advertising vitamin’. And continue to explore them from a very personal perspective. ‘Animal kingdom’ (Official Fantasy Contest) is an environmental tale about a wave of mutations that transform a small portion of the population into animal creatures. François (Romain Duris), married to a woman suffering from this process, boards the ship with her teenage son Émile (Paul KircherThe emergence of ‘Dialogue with Life’) trying to find a solution in a new family phase.
The most interesting aspect of the project is the natural intersection of extreme assumptions: pure fantasy spectacle is accompanied by the most subtle social, psychological and geographical realism. “I am very interested mix of genres, records“, explains the director in Sitges.”That a film can be both intimate and spectacular, realistic and fantastical, have action but also more thought-provoking or poetic moments.. “I like the coexistence of all these, like in Bong Joon-ho’s films, which remind me of life because of the variety of colors.”
Other perhaps clearer references to ‘Animal Kingdom’ are Spielberg and shyamalanAccording to Cailley, “directors who make human dramas that can work without the fantasy element are: ‘ET’ would be cool even if it wasn’t an alienbut even better because of him; The story is stronger.” The director points out that the relationships part of his film owes a lot to the excellent editing. ‘The Place to Nowhere’ by Sidney Lumetwith the Phoenix River and Clint Eastwood’s ‘A Perfect World’Two wonderful works about fatherhood.
Optimism rather than anxiety
This year, other fantastic French films about animals, nature and climate were also watched at the festival. There is an example of Just Philippot’s new album ‘Acide’ (the story of the ‘Cloud’ that terrorizes the environment), an adventure of disasters heavily inspired by global warming: strange clouds begin to float around during a heat wave Acid rain fell all over France.
At the same time ‘Vermin: plague’ by Sébastien Vaniček, a variant of modern ‘Arachnophobia’ It’s about an attack by increasingly deadly endless spiders on a neighborhood on the outskirts of a major city. Like the creatures in ‘Animal Kingdom’, they are not exactly monsters, but, as film critic Bilge Ebiri said of ‘Vulture’, “just another species trying to survive in a hostile and strange place”.
Can we see this increase as a result of modern eco-concerns? Or is it simply due to the emergence of a new environmental awareness? “I don’t consider myself environmentally concerned, even though I realize the planet is in very bad shape,” Cailley says. “I grew old in an increasingly impoverished world. But for me This film was an opportunity to suggest almost the opposite of eco-anxiety: that this mutation, this abnormality, is causing biodiversity and enriching the world.“.
Mixed feelings
Cailley deftly toys with the audience’s expectations, placing them in rich and ambivalent emotional territory. What at first seems monstrous begins to look utopian. As the mutants and the audience cry for the life they left behind, their hope for what could happen grows. “The viewer, an old woman, told me that she was afraid of monsters at the beginning of the movie, but was afraid of men by the end.. “I thought it was a good reflection.”
If there is one final message of the story, it is that we must accept the other: “I hope we change the way we look at what we see. That’s why the whole film is shot at eye level and, very importantly, given to the creatures’ gaze. We look at them, they look at us… I hope we can all manage to look at each other in the end.” .I believe it is possible to care for others, accept the difference, and let’s live in peace together.”