Only The Animals

Only The Animals, which was screened on Curzon Home Cinema, opens in the Ivory Coast with a lad cycling with a goat on his back... before we are transported quickly to rural southern France in the snowy winter.

Alice (Laure Calamy) is a farmer’s wife who sells insurance and one of her clients is another farmer, the reclusive Joseph (Damien Bonnard), who is struggling to get over the death of his mother. Meanwhile another neighbour, Evelyne (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) has gone missing.

Alice’s morose husband Michel (Denis Ménochet) is acting rather suspiciously. Uninterested in his attractive wife, he is always working late in his office while his wife is forcing herself on to the equally morose Joseph who seems to just about tolerate the sex with her. There is no accounting for her taste in men.

Then there’s Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a waitress who was Evelyne’s much younger lover and who became obsessed with her. She is entwined further into the story when her image is confused with the one being used by Armand (Guy Roger N’Drin), the lad with the goat in the Ivory Coast, in an internet phishing scam into which he’s hooked Michel into believing he’s talking to, and sending money to, a girl called Amandine.

Armand needs to make money as he has his own girl trouble. He in love with a woman called Monique (Perline Eyombwan) who is the mother of his child but is now with a wealthier older man who turns out to be Evelyne’s husband Guillaume (Roland Plantin) and they’re headed for France.

There you are, I’ve spoilt the whole tangled circular plot for you. Well almost. It’s a bit more complicated than that and the brilliant thing about the film is how it’s stitched together by telling their overlapping stories with ingenious point of view shifts which often clear up one oddity before presenting us with a new one.

Possibility the best thing I’ve seen this year so far.

Parasite

We finally catch up with the film Parasite which was the first ever non-English language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Not only did it win Best Picture but it also won Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Film.

The film is about two very different families from opposite ends of the spectrum as regards class and wealth etc. Without trying to sound too ‘Family Fortunes’, there is the Kim family who live in a small basement apartment, have jobs as pizza box folders and freeload on other people's wifi and there is the Park family who live in a mansion and have servants.

The paths of these two families cross when the Kim’s son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) is offered the chance to take over a friend’s job as tutor to the wealthy Park’s daughter Da-hye (Jung Ziso). He has no qualifications for this but his artist sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam) is adept at forgery and supplies him with a fake certificate to bluff his way into the job.

Mrs Park is so impressive with him, now known as ‘Kevin’ and not knowing he’s already seduced her daughter, that she asks him if he could recommend an art tutor for their son (Jung Hyun-jun).

Enter Ki-jung, or rather ‘Jessica’, allegedly the cousin of a friend and she is quickly hired too. Together they contrive to frame the family chauffeur, getting him fired for having sex in the family car where ‘Jessica’ has left her underwear. They already have a replacement in mind, their father (Song Kang-ho).

They then remove the family’s housekeeper after they exploit her allergic reaction to peaches but passing it off as tuberculosis. When she is dismissed they install their mum (Chang Hyae-jin) instead.

Although still living mostly in their dank basement apartment, they all seem to scrub up surprisingly well when they need to. However the Park’s Son notices that for a bunch of strangers that claim to not know each other they all smell remarkably alike, and like they have come from a dank basement apartment.

When the Parks leave on a camping trip, the Kim’s all move in and revel in the luxuries of their borrowed abode but the old housekeeper appears at the door saying she has left something in the cellar. This something turns out to be her husband, who has been secretly living there for years, hiding from his debts.

Parasite is a clever black comedy that is set up brilliantly in the first half and which descends into farce and violence in the second half as rain curtails the Park’s camping trip forcing them to return home as a violent battle erupts between the Kims and housekeeper's family for parasitic rites to the mansion.

The violence continues the next day at the Park’s son's birthday party leading to several deaths and eventually a new family moving into the mansion while a new resident hides out in the cellar.

It’s wonderful stuff and best seen before the inevitable Hollywood remake.