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‘Animale’ Review: A Bullish Sophomore Effort from French Director Emma Benestan
This year's Cannes Critics' Week closer, Emma Benestan's 'Animale' is a slow-burn animal transformation drama, starring Oulaya Amamra.
In “ Animale,” the closing film of this year’s Cannes Critics’ Week section, director Emma Benestan is rather more interested in the interpersonal dynamics navigated by 22-year-old female bull-runner Nejma (Oulaya Amamra) than in really savouring some promising horror implications. This helps keep Nejma’s ambitions sympathetic to modern audiences, many of whom would probably not concur with the snappy Spanish characterization employed by Ernest Hemingway (and further popularized and later renounced by Orson Welles) of bullfighting as “indefensible but irresistible.” It’s not unfamiliar territory for Benestan, whose knowledge of the subject is informed by her 2021 documentary “Fearless Girl,” about female bull-runner Marie Segrétier. (In Critics’ Week alone in recent years, we’ve had “Tiger Stripes,” “Raw” and “When Animals Dream.”) The female body provides a fertile canvas for these narratives of animalistic impulses unleashed, but for filmmakers gearing up to pitch a film along these lines, it’s probably worth considering quite carefully what fresh angle you’re able to bring to the setup.
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