“Like wild animals”: ​​“As Bestas” in the cinema: That’s unfair

The film is most beautiful in the cinema,” warns the press service, but firstly, streaming is sometimes easier, and secondly, the reviewer would have missed the few random minutes of animal film in the cinema in which three cheetahs tear down an antelope that is desperately running towards death and the possible empty space in the film Show veganism: The freedom that this claims for animals is not without a neoliberal accent.

The reserved freedom with which the Spanish-French production “As Bestas – Like Wild Animals” begins is perhaps more tolerable, because the Galician wild horses are not completely wild, but are, we learn, sheared and marked, which is what they are used for have to be caught once. This is done by men who wrestle the animals down with their bare arms; and when it is worried, all you see is its nostrils, which open and close, marking the life instinct as a resistance instinct.

The scene will be repeated in the film when the French dropout Antoine, who has fulfilled his dream of small-scale organic farming with his wife Olga in the mountains of Galicia, ends up in a headlock with the brothers Xan and Loren, who hate Antoine and poison his well and never miss an opportunity to denounce him as an occupier and a “Frenchman”. Antoine is a city dweller, a teacher and has traveled around the world, and that, as Xan points out to him, is “unfair because you’ve been playing the pawn here for two years. I’ve lived here for 52 years,” and he didn’t choose to live hand to mouth in a dying village abandoned by the young, with no education, no wife and no opportunities. Xan, whose cultural capital consists of small change, cannot forgive Antoine for voting against the planned wind farm and the supposedly big money out of left-green conviction.

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This is the biggest scene in the film, a battle of words in a poorly lit village inn. Xan is actually the bad guy. He is before, and he is even more so later, the personification of envy, hatred and willingness to use violence; But here he is just a natural loser who, not without intellectual dignity, asserts himself against the Anywhere who has swooped in, but who, for his part, cannot leave because his entire savings are in what has long been home for him. (The film can’t do anything about the contemporary historical allegory that presents itself, but it doesn’t do it any harm either.)

But then there is a difference whether someone intentionally turns their back on the world or whether they are born with their back to it, and it is the weakness of a captivating, formally sure-footed film that it does not do so after the central scene more interested. The image of the defeated Antoine gasping for air is an inversion, because the “wild animals”, the beasts, are and remain Xan and Loren, who force the spirit and reason to the ground: nature’s revenge on the Enlightenment, the so in turn it becomes a natural phenomenon, something without social conditions.

Fascism, we know, is the revenge of stupidity on the intellect; but who is stupid, and who is stupid and why not? The speech duel between in front of the screen, is like Antoine.

Nobody is like In contrast, Antoine isn’t even an unsympathetic bio-hipster, but rather the image of a man who wants peace and quiet and does the right thing: that’s the loving husband, good father and grandfather who repairs the dilapidated houses unpaid to save the village Good itself, which has no chance against evil. As simple as that; but if it is that simple, then what is is everything. The fact that “As Bestas” was showered with prizes doesn’t mean anything good.

Anyone who enjoys dialectics may think that what speaks for Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s (fascinatingly trilingual) film is that it only becomes clear to you at the end credits, after the spell of identification has been broken, which stood for stupidity, against Adorno’s word , after all it is a natural quality. The story, you can read, has a real model, but what does that mean: that the world cannot become good because evil is always against it? And doesn’t a look at the TV news show that it’s true?

To vary Schiller: Life is serious, art is further, because if art just copies life, we don’t need it. In this case it is an extraordinarily beautiful copy, and in the second half of the film you can admire Olga’s sparse strength, which is almost copied from the landscape and seems to have been cut out of a novel by Marlen Haushofer. But at the end of this intellectual cinema of suggestion and overwhelm, one justice triumphs and the other justice is disavowed; and the fact that the reviewing citizen child is vegetatively for it, isn’t that just the problem?

“As Bestas – Like Wild Animals”, France/Spain 2022. Director: Rodrigo Sorogoyen; Book: Isabel Peña, Rodrigo Sorogoyen. With: Denis Ménochet, Marina Foïs, Luis Zahera. 139 min. Release date: December 7th.

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