Unpleasant and bewildering in a way
that seems somehow unfortunately worthwhile, Animal Love is like the
grimy flipside of a warm and fuzzy Animal
Planet show. Austrian director Ulrich Siedl lobbed this into the squirming public’s
lap all the way back in 1995, but it’s just now finding its premiere in
Rochester (maybe being banned in Norway helped).
Most of the film is actually
dedicated to documenting various freaks and losers grinding out derelict lives
in squalid apartments in Austria. Their often unhealthy and exploitative
relationships with their pets are used as the basis for insight to their
obsessions and ways of dealing with the world. It’s brilliant, it’s terrible;
you shouldn’t see it, and you should.
Three other films immediately come to
mind: the first is Errol Morris’s greatest achievement, Gates of Heaven. Ostensiblyabout
pet cemeteries, that doc coaxed from its human subjects a multitude of the
philosophies and quirks that defined them, good or bad.
Animal
Love clearly shoots for the same effect, if in a thoroughly more cynical
and dispiriting vein. A scurvy youngfellow
buys a bunny for the sake of better cadging change from passersby, and then
later, after his sexual ignorance has been conveniently shown, offers his
tongue to his dog to kiss. (Yes, there is much in this vein; no, there is no
bestiality.)
I say “conveniently” because it
becomes clear right away watching this film that it is not fully a documentary,
and does not pretend to be. It’s full of static, artfully composed shots, often
with a pair of people consciously split between background and foreground. And
yet, something tells you that these are real people. It turns out the director
disdains boundaries between documentary and fiction (he has a writing credit on
the film, although there is no voiceover), and will only say that these are
real people sometimes doing things he has asked them to do. This is essentially
a documentary with fictive garnish.
Which brings us to Dadetown, a fake documentary about the
corporate erosion of a small town, and the second film Animal Love recalls. Meant to fool you up to the end credits, Dadetown loses pretty much all of its
power as social critique at whatever point you realize it’s a fake — it’s
hard to find injustice in a synthesized situation, and the film is not
compelling as fiction. Not so with Animal
Love.
The points and associations being
made are compelling, disturbing, and salient (if toward the end they are ridden
a bit hard as the film overstays its welcome). As pure, staged fiction, it
would essentially be Gummo (film
number three), and I would probably embrace Siedl’s film as enthusiastically as
I did Harmony Korine’s if it were.
If only it were. It would be a lot easier to take. Most of this movie
is pretty creepy, and there is an excruciating scene of one dog attacking
another while their owners are walking them. I doubt very much that was fake,
and if I weren’t reviewing the film, I probably would have stopped watching at
that point.
In another sequence, a little show
dog is shown on a platter as decoration in a living room, just after a few
seemingly staged shots of dogs tied on short tethers inside the house (although who knows, maybe people really do that).
It’s a disturbing succession of images, but an evocative one, and an example of
the creative intelligence behind the disquieting nature of the film. But at
other times Seidl’s interests are more than I can bear.
When the dog that attacks the other
is finally freed, your sympathies and interest are firmly with the injured dog.
But you never find out how he is — you never see him after he is pulled away.
Siedl’s camera stays planted on the aggressor. With this movie, you only get
the ugly.
Animal
Love screens at the Dryden Theatre, in the George Eastman House, 900 East
Avenue, on Friday, August 27, at 8 p.m. and on Saturday, August 28, at 5 p.m.
— Andy Davis
This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2004.
