Animale

A real catch for Frightfest 2024, and a film deserving of much wider attention, Emma Benestan’s poetic take on gender, power and corporeality is a deeply animal experience. It is a film defined by Ruben Impens’ impressionistic cinematography and Gert Janssen’s extraordinary landscape of sound. It deserves to be watched on the biggest screen you can find, but how you see it, alone or in a mass of sweaty bodies, will fundamentally influence what you take away from the experience.

The film opens with the bulls, cool and black, steaming slightly in the morning air. We hear their heavy breath, get a sense of their power as they paw at the ground, churning up dirt, scuffling with one another. Dominance is important to them, but they are a pack. When the human come on their white Camargue horses, they crowd together. We hear the splashing of their hooves as they are driven along the shallow river, out of the green tangle of fields and trees and into the dry, dusty paddock beside the bull ring.

This isn’t the sort of bull ring where animals are killed for sport. All the young men – and newcomer Nejma (Oulaya Amamra) too – respect these animals, caring for them and removing them from play if they show signs of injury. The game is to run with them in the ring, stealing tassels and rosettes from their heads without getting gored or trampled in the process. The bull runners are skillful and fast, jumping over walls to escape into the stands. They know how to move around the animals. In a practice session, Nejma tests her skill against a man holding a set of horns, learning where to apply pressure to them to redirect an attack.

Later, at the bar, the bull runners discuss their favourite animals. Joker comes out top but Nejma likes Thunder. There’s something about him, she says. She seems to identify with him. We learn from her gay flatmate Tony (Damien Rebattel) that she’s never had a love affair, and he’s not the only one to joke that she seems more in love with the bulls. “What happens if you get gored in the stomach and can’t have children?” a woman, perhaps her mother asks her, but Nejma has no wish to be restricted by her sex. She can handle herself just fine in the shared dressing room with the men. When they tell her that they’re going to a party, when they tell her they plan to take drugs, she wants to be part of all of that, too.

Viewers might be reminded of another recent Francophone film, Hunting Daze, in the party scenes where the handheld camera, moving with the rhythm, presses into the throng. Nejma is utterly at ease with her own humanity, and confident in her body, yet subtle cues reveal the ways that some of the others see her differently. Later, out in the fields, events will take a darker turn. But all this is prequel. The already vibrant, absorbing film picks up the pace when one of the other bull runners is found gored to death. Nobody knows how it could have happened. Nejma too is scarred by an attack, though she can barely remember what happened, and with her colleagues reluctant to take her to a hospital, what first aid they can provide may be inadequate. Her wounds linger. She begins to experience strange hallucinations, becoming less certain of her own bodily identity.

As news of what has happened inevitably leaks and fear grips the local area, Nejma becomes afraid for the bulls, embodying something of that wild spirit, which, even in its power, is acutely aware of its vulnerability. We keep returning to a scene where a young bull is wrestled down and branded, crying out in pain. In the fields, the bulls run together in the dark, their long horns gleaming, through the long grass and the silvered water. Her horse, Lucía, peers through her windows at night, concerned. The night is wild with cicadas and the sound of distant dogs. By day, thick mist clings to the ground beneath white skies, the shadows of the animals slipping through it as their hooves thunder against the earth. The film is full of power held in abeyance, full of the smouldering potential for violence, but understanding what is happening requires a willingness to let go of the artifices of human thought, to get closer to what is raw and natural.

In exploring this, Benestan adopts a radical stance, upending some of the fundamental assumptions on which our society is based. By raising up what is intuitive in defiance of lazy logic, she breaks free from convention, setting out a different way of understanding what is real and what has been imposed. This is a film racked with pain, but its final scream announces the birth of something new.