After Combatants and nine years of absence, Thomas Cailley returns with a film that makes a sensation at the cinema in this month of October: The Animal Kingdom. Evidence of a revival in French cinema? We will try to see more clearly below...
Bring in the monsters...
François (Romain Duris) tries everything to help his wife, plagued by the mysterious animal mutations that affect a part of humanity. His internment in a specialized structure will force him, as will his son Emile (Paul Kircher), to move south of France. Yet, when she escapes from the centre where she is kept, their existence will be deeply jammed...
This is without saying too much the starting point of this Animal rule, which unexpectedly disembarks in the career of Thomas Cailley after almost a decade of absence. Budget increase and consequent casting (Romain Duris as father, Paul Kircher to play Emile and Adèle Exarchopoulos in Gendarme), his cinema is taking on a new dimension. And it must be noted that Cailley is negotiating this turn quite brilliantly.
Fracasing opening
Much of his film is held in his opening scene, featuring the father-son duo and their adorable Australian shepherd named Albert. The car doesn't make much progress, stuck in traffic jams. The horns resonate. And inexorably, despite the aphorisms launched by the father to educate his son, the tension rises in the cabin until Emile opens the door and goes away.
« He who comes into the world to trouble nothing deserves neither consideration nor patience. »
The rather quiet camera then turns on, follows the duo preceded by the canid between the parked cars, until a sound shock stops them in their argument. Cries emanate from an ambulance, a few steps from the two protagonists, before leaving room for pure violence: two caregivers are expelled by the back doors, torn by the power of the shock. And an amazing creature, caught more than seen, pulls out of the vehicle to escape while flying.
In this scene the father-son relationship, which will cross the entire feature film, between clashes and successive rapprochements, was first born. Cailley also prefigures the moto of his camera movements, carried to the shoulder but stabilized. In short, neither shake-cam nor fixed planes, but an intertwined one that allows it the elasticity necessary for the action bursts depressing on the plane while keeping a perfectly legible image. Finally, the scene bears the will (and the practical necessity, necessarily) of the suggestion: if The Animal Kingdom is not avarous in effect (far from there!), Cailley will use, as well as the sometimes partial unveiling of creatures, to compete with the great American show competition, while not yielding to the effects cheap or with a coarse eye.
Gourmet cinema
Generous therefore, and sometimes almost too much, as he launches various narrative frames allowing a multiplicity of films to be born within this Animal rule. As long as it is sometimes difficult for Cailley to give all the necessary consistency to these many intrigues, like romance in the form of Teen movie which surrounds Emile and his band, but also a character of Gendarme incarnate by Adele Exarchopoulos which remains a fabulous comedy teammate despite his scriptural emptiness. And this is one of the few criticisms to be made of this feature film.
Better, this remonstrance allows the film to engage a multiple speech too, and for the brilliantly controlled shot. A body-horror to the Cronenberg (inevitably referring to The Fly) following the metaphor of physical changes behind adolescence up to the intrinsic organization of a society systematically repelling the return to the wild, passing through the fate of animality portrayed in an unarming way, the senrobe film gives a generous plurality of discourse.
And this successive layer construction finds its echo in the very craft of the film, mixing incredible artistic performances (in particular for Tom Mercier, alias Fix l'homme birdie), an immoderate taste for practical effects and the addition of a clever digital lace to complete the previous ones.
Perfect casting?
Let us note on the actor side the judicious choice of the trio we mentioned above. Paul Kircher becomes even more convincing than in the yet already exciting The Lycean of the Christophe Honoré. Romain Duris, in spite of a few lines falling from his lips (especially at the beginning of the film), he was a wonderful father and poor husband trying both well and badly to cope with the turmoil of their new existence. And Adèle Exarchopoulos, perfect despite a rather unconstant role, who reconnects with the genre cinema after casting one of the best fantastic films of last year, The Five Devils.
Anyway, The Animal Kingdom Thomas Cailley manages to offer a brilliant genre feature, generous and powerful, intelligent in what he tells without amputating his pan of pure great show. A moving adventure, to be discovered in theaters.
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