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Le Regen Animal This is the great French film of this new season: Le Regen animal by Thomas Cailley, thwarts the codes of fantasy and offers a powerful universal fable on our relationship with nature and difference. To see and even see again.
In a slightly divergent B world, humans are prey to a strange mutation that slowly transforms them into animal creatures and divides France between the pro-cohabitation and those who park “the critters” in prisons… when they do not take out the rifle. Judiciously, the film does not dwell on the origin of this calamity, preferring three very well-executed directions: the father-son relationship, brilliantly embodied by Romain Duris and the promising Paul Kircher, both upset by the metamorphosis of their wife-mother; the strength of emancipation, whatever its age; and above all human behaviors in the face of otherness, here, mutants Le Regen Animal.
The height of irony given the subject, in the summer of 2022, production must be interrupted to escape the gigantic fires – since recognized as linked to climate change – while there are five weeks of work left… entirely in the forest. After two months, the team will finally find a substitute setting near Biscarrosse, surrounded by thousands of hectares consumed by the fire. This clash with reality is also very present in Thomas Cailley. If the climate crisis is never explicitly linked to mutations, eco-political references run through the film. “This silence [in the forest] is not normal,” François worries, “It’s because of the monoculture of conifers [which killed the insects],” Julia replies. Needless to say, we understand where these characters stand, concerned about their environment and leading a rather simple life, yet the first affected by the “mutation”. Some will notice a disturbing parallel with the contemporary situation…
The birth of a new story
How can we not see the metaphor of the myth of Icarus through the character of the “birdman”, Fix – carried by wonderful special effects anti standardized 3D? Icarus, among the Greeks, burns his wings by flying too close to the sun, punished by his excess of desire.The wolf also plays a rather symbolic leading role in the film. Alongside Hobbes, we think of the she-wolf who founded Rome, her links with death and the idea of rebirth.
In short, Thomas Cailley achieves something rare to talk about the – almost already – hackneyed subject of our world in peril: he creates a new story. “I believe it is vital to invent new stories that explore our interactions with the rest of the living. Not through the prism of inevitable collapse, or yet another post-apocalyptic story, but by showing a vital, violent and creative impulse. A new frontier,” he explains in the film’s press kit. Isn’t the elegance of great films to let the spectators finish them?
