«Animals» is the kind of film that, when it ended, I thought, "I would have wanted to make a movie like this." And it has nothing to do with its subject or its technical values, but with its dramaturgical proposal and its audiovisual conception. Nabil Ben Yadir appears for the first time in my panorama of contemporary world cinema. And maybe, in a few years, he will abandon this way of telling us a story and become more "mainstream". Or maybe not.
The fact is that Yadir uses a structural and narrative strategy that, because it is rare in ordinary cinema, makes more convincing its account of the crime of the 32-year-old Belgian citizen Ihsane Jarfi, which occurred in the city of Liège in 2012, at the hands of four men who inhumanly humiliated him, tortured him, robbed him and abandoned him naked on the outskirts of the city, where he died a few hours later.
The first part of the film takes place during his mother's birthday, in which Ihsane's older brother (in the film, Brahim) causes tragedy by preventing Brahim's five-year-old partner from reaching the celebration. He assaults and expels him without Brahim knowing: similarly, the director spares us the scene and concentrates on the homophobia of the brother, who corners Brahim and wields the old claim of "respect" for the (Muslim) family. The rhythm of this block of scenes, encounters (including a beautiful one, between Brahim and his father) and disagreements, is agile, dynamic, with hand-held camera, establishing a happy contrast between the party, Brahim's wait for his lover and the harassment of his brother and his wife. Brahim leaves the party.
The next block is the most tense and impressive, an orgy of violence and death that mixes shots of traditional composition and format with long fixed shots of the camera observing (Brahim naked in the trunk, for example) and other moving shots shot using the format of mobiles. After having several drinks in a gay nightclub that he often visits, Brahim helps a prostitute on the street being harassed by four drugged and drunk men who are celebrating the birthday of the vilest of all. Brahim proposes to take them to a women's bar, unaware that he has proposed his own death. This time the director does not spare us details and it is worth warning susceptible people that this section could affect them.
The final third of the film is dramaturgically brilliant, introducing us to the home of Loïc, the youngest of the four murderers, when his cronies drop him off at his door. A few minutes are enough to deduce the violence generated by his family picture. However, Yadir's script reserves more surprises for us when Loïc, barely out of adolescence, attends his biological father's wedding, where, in addition to seeing the boy suffer a crisis of pain in the hands with which he contributed to the death of Brahim, the 360-degree circular final shot reveals a detail of his father that obliquely but unmistakably establishes a connection to the crime.
«Animals» is a recommendable film about the global reality of homophobia in social strata that we rarely think of looking at, in these days when everyone celebrates the tricks of gender and the trans world. It is interesting that the film resists the fashionable formats (wide screen) and uses the old aspect ratio of 4:3, as in the origins of cinema in which films were squares of light.
