Seules les bêtes (2019)

(Dominik Moll)

SPOILER ALERT:  It’s only fair in this instance to give a plot spoiler warning additional to the general one on my home page …

Animals are well represented but don’t fare well in Dominik Moll’s film.  It begins in the streets of Abidjan, where a cycle carries an unusual cargo – a live goat, sitting nearly upright and strapped to the cyclist’s back.  They’re heading to the den of a local shaman.  From what we see of the latter’s rituals later in Only the Animals, we can infer the passenger wasn’t a live goat much longer.  Moll’s narrative moves between the Ivory Coast’s economic capital and southern France, predominantly isolated farmsteads in Lozère, near the Massif Central.  There we meet a few dogs, plenty more sheep and cows.  One dog, stuck inside a car, witnesses its owner being strangled; another is shot dead by its owner – a farmer who then takes his own life.  As all this suggests, the human animals in the story don’t tend to prosper either.  But the film, adapted by the director and Gilles Marchand from Colin Niel’s 2017 novel of the same name, is so smartly plotted and constructed, and some of its characters are so engrossing, that Only the Animals isn’t a lowering experience.   You could even call it a feelgood movie.  It lifts the spirits because it’s so splendidly done.

The film comprises four sections, each bearing the name of a character:  Alice, Joseph, Marion, Amandine.  The sections are overlapping:  they partly consist of the same events, presented from different points of view.  Each section also has an element unique to itself.  Until the climax to the fourth of the sections, their unrepeated parts represent a movement backwards in time which often elucidates things unresolved or hard to fathom in earlier parts.  The four chapters’ common plot strand – or, rather, the most salient common plot strand:  a clever thing about Only the Animals is how much its several strands eventually interlock – is the disappearance of Evelyne Ducat (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), an affluent married woman whose home is in Lozère.  Evelyne goes missing after a night of heavy snowfall there.  This isn’t good weather for white subtitles.  Fortunately, it’s cold enough for people outdoors to be well wrapped up in dark clothing (cf The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant).

Alice (Laure Calamy) is an insurance agent, though her manner on a visit to an elderly woman client suggests, rather, a social worker.  Alice gives a similar impression when she’s talking with another client, the reclusive farmer Joseph (Damien Bonnard), in his kitchen – until she suddenly mounts him.  The sex doesn’t go on long before he tells her he wants to be alone.  Alice lives with her husband Michel (Denis Ménochet) on the farm that he manages and her father (Fred Ulysse) owns.  She and Michel share a bed but not much domestic time together.  She brings his meals to the office where Michel works long hours at the farm accounts or, at least, fixated on a computer screen.  Evelyne barely appears in the ‘Alice’ story, except as a photograph on a TV news report of her disappearance.  In the ‘Joseph’ story, she’s revealed to be the corpse the title character drags into a hay barn.  He makes Evelyne at home there.  In his fantasies, she offers a sympathetic ear as Joseph recalls his mother’s death and its aftermath.  He didn’t let anyone know and left his mother’s corpse to rot in her bed.

These first two episodes, although bleakly compelling, occasionally verge on parody of rural solitude and benightedness drama – the second episode especially, despite Damien Bonnard’s convincing playing of Joseph.  The third episode is different.  Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) is a waitress in a Sète hotel where Evelyne is staying while on business in the city.  The two women, in spite of an age difference of some thirty years, are soon revealed to be lovers.  It’s a passionate affair but it’s soon clear too that their feelings for one another are different.  Marion is in love with Evelyne, who wants only a physical relationship.   It’s an inconvenience for her when, after her return to Lozère, Marion turns up at her home – albeit that Evelyne’s husband Guillaume (Roland Plantin) isn’t currently around.  (As he explains in a TV interview soon after his wife’s disappearance, the couple lead rather separate lives.  It was only after Evelyne hadn’t been seen or in touch for a day or two that Guillaume reported her missing.)  Evelyne nevertheless doesn’t want Marion staying with her and gives her money for a hotel room.  Marion angrily rejects it and ends up on a cheap camping site.  Nadia Tereszkiewicz’s straightforward emotional energy gives proceedings a lift but the best is yet to come.

Amandine isn’t a real person as such.  She is, to use Adam Mars-Jones’s phrase (in his TLS review), the ‘nom de phish’ of Armand (Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’ N’Drin), a young Ivorian.  He and his mates in Abidjan are looking to get rich quick through online impersonation of young women whom men in France are ready to pay to be cyber-excited by.  The youngsters dream of emulating the self-styled ‘Rolex the Bourgeois’ (Cheick Diakité), a local celebrity after making it big in this line of work.  Once he’s bought a photograph and spicy video clips of the girl he’s going to be, and named her Amandine, Armand starts phishing.  The bait is taken hook, line and sinker by Alice’s husband Michel.  Text exchanges are, unsurprisingly, an increasingly familiar narrative device in films but those between Michel and Amandine are the most dramatic that I’ve so far seen.  You follow their online conversations as avidly as do Armand’s friends, huddled around him, peering over his shoulder at the laptop screen.

Only the Animals travels a large cultural distance both between the Massif Central and the Ivory Coast, and within each locale.  In France, the de nos jours form of Michel’s obsession contrasts sharply with a black-and-white photograph on display in the deranged farmer’s house.  The photo, of the child Joseph with his mother, seems to belong to a distant past.  The coexistence of online scamming, witchcraft and conspicuous wealth in Abidjan is especially striking.  It’s Armand who, on his visit to the shaman Papa Sanou (Christian Ezan), is obliged as part of the procedure to drink from a bowl of what may well be goat’s blood and other caprine body parts.  When his alter ego starts earning, Armand publicly flaunts his wad, Loadsamoney-style.  He even throws bank notes into an excited nightclub crowd.  It’s not that he becomes wealthy in absolute terms – even getting into debt, Michel hasn’t the wherewithal to make that happen.  But at least Armand can perform as a rich man.  He styles himself, in Rolex the Bourgeois tradition, ‘NMW’ – which stands for ‘No Money Worries’.  (The English – or American – sobriquet may be a status symbol in itself.)

Dominik Moll avoids blunt characterisation of Armand and Michel as, respectively, heartless trickster and pathetically easy prey.  Armand is revealed to be emotionally needy too.  It turns out he’s a father.  His infant daughter and her mother, Armand’s ex-girlfriend Monique (Perline Eyombwan), live in truly affluent style, in the Abidjan residence of a European businessman whose kept woman Monique is, and who’s rarely at home.  Armand is still in love with Monique and insists he can give her an even better lifestyle than she already enjoys.  (Monique clearly has feelings for her ex too but knows better.)  Armand ups the financial ante by having Amandine tell her online admirer she needs money to escape her present life.  Michel pays, thinking he’ll actually get to see her in France.  Both men, each in his singular way, demonstrate the truth of Papa Sanou’s gnomic spiritual pronouncement that ‘Love is giving what you don’t have’.

In a generally strong cast, Denis Ménochet and Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’ N’Drin are outstanding.  The latter, making his screen acting debut, is a real talent.  The animation in his face – especially the determination in his eyes when Armand is engaging in text exchanges and having to think quickly what to write next, in order to get the reaction he wants – is an exciting complement to ‘Bibisse’’s naturally easy movement.  Denis Ménochet has acted before, many times and often impressively, but his performance in Only the Animals is, even so, a revelation.  For a large part of the film, Michel is virtually immobile – at his PC, in his car, lying in bed beside Alice.  Ménochet’s bulk and the misery he’s able, without histrionics, to exude, powerfully convey his character’s trapped despair.

Ménochet’s greatest achievement is to make believable what might seem to be the implausible coincidence on which the whole plot depends (although that echoes another of Papa Sanou’s insights:  he tells Armand he’s a fool if he doesn’t realise that chance is stronger than he is).  When she arrives in Lozère to seek out Evelyne, Michel is convinced that Marion is Amandine.  Their first, momentary encounter comes when she’s trying to hitch a lift.  Alice, in the passenger seat, suggests they oblige and Michel slows the car down.  When he catches sight of the girl, he changes his mind and, to Alice’s bewilderment, drives off quickly.   Ménochet expresses the force of desire that makes Michel see Amandine and the weight of guilt that makes him ignore her.  (It has to be said that Nadia Tereszkiewicz’s looks help too with this – she’s more attractive than she is distinctive.)   Once Michel is on his own again, the desire wins out and he tracks Amandine down to Marion’s campsite hutch.  She’s not there when he first calls so he leaves money in the door.  Marion is infuriated when she finds the money, assuming it to be payment for services from her female lover.  When Evelyne does come to the campsite, there’s a noisy argument between the two women.  Michel, sitting in his car nearby, hears the tail end of this as Evelyne exits.  When he then introduces himself to Amandine, Marion angrily sends him packing.

‘Amandine’ is by far the best, as well as the longest, of the four sections.  That it starts to eclipse interest in what exactly happened to Evelyne isn’t a criticism of Only the Animals, merely an acknowledgement that the human interest of the Armand-Michel story overrides the film’s mystery thriller aspect.  The local gendarme (Bastien Bouillon) does investigate Evelyne’s  disappearance and finally works out what’s happened but his doing so doesn’t carry the weight it normally would in a piece with this kind of storyline.  The great merit of the plot is that the disappearance and the human interest drama prove to be inextricably linked.  Evelyne leaves the campsite only just before Michel, whose hurt incomprehension now knows no bounds.  His car follows hers into the mountains.  He forces it to stop and Evelyne to get out.  He then strangles her.  Soon afterwards, Michel, who brusquely ignored an earlier call from an Ivorian scam-detection unit, is forced to realise what’s been going on and his terrible series of errors.  He takes a flight to Abidjan, where he runs Armand to earth.   If this sequence of events sounds melodramatic I can only say it doesn’t play out that way.  Michel accosts Armand and pushes him up against a wall (the physical contrasts between the two actors, noticeable throughout, are emphatically confirmed here).   But this is as far as Michel’s aggression goes.  The last we see of him he’s looking at a laptop screen and even smiles ruefully at the latest text he receives.  Armand, by now, is lovelorn too, having lost Monique, who leaves Abidjan with their daughter.  In a startling postscript, we see the two of them arriving in the snows of Lozère, in the company of an older man who carries their luggage.  He is Guillaume Ducat.

The film’s French and English titles are a good example of what can get lost in translation.  Only the Animals is a fair literal rendering of Seules les bêtes but the French can mean so much more.  For a start, it can mean ‘Only Animals’, without the definite article and with the (partly ironic) implication that animals is all that people are.  A bête can be a stupid person as well as a beast of the field; seul can mean alone.  A thread running through the story suggests that a stable human relationship is hard to achieve.  Most of the main characters are involved in some kind of extra-marital affair.  Alice and Michel keep their distance from each other, ditto Evelyne and Guillaume.  Evelyne wants to engage with another body, regardless of the personality that goes with it.  Joseph’s solitude is relieved by one corpse, then another.  (He kills himself by throwing himself into the deep pit that already holds his mother and Evelyne.)  The most sustained dynamic interaction in the film comes between two virtual identities.

Only the Animals is that rare combination, satisfying as a piece of ingenious, jigsaw-puzzle plotting and as a dramatically rich exploration of people and culture.  One odd thing:  while you get to understand all you need to understand about the humans in the story, there are a few unanswered questions concerning the non-humans.  Take Evelyne’s dog, who has the suggestive name Fantômas (a masked master of disguise in a series of popular French crime fiction novels of yesteryear).  Still inside his owner’s car when she’s been dragged outside it, why doesn’t Fantômas bark and snarl at Michel until after he’s killed Evelyne?  And, since I’m always vexed when movies forget about the animals they’ve introduced:  who’s going to feed Joseph’s cows, left to fend for themselves?  Seules les bêtes.  Perhaps the title means that only the behaviour and fate of quadrupeds won’t be satisfactorily dealt with in Dominik Moll’s fine film.

19 June 2020