L’Animale – first look review

Take a trip down to your local cin­e­ma at any giv­en time of the year and you’ll like­ly trip over a cou­ple of com­ing-of-age dra­mas. It’s a nar­ra­tive thread that con­tin­ues to pre­vail in cin­e­ma, usu­al­ly with results not worth writ­ing home about. Every once in a while, a film pops up that man­ages to wan­der down this well-trod­den path with a new swag­ger (see: Call Me By Your Name, Raw, Lady Bird). Katha­ri­na Mueckstein’s L’Animale is an assured sopho­more fea­ture in a sim­i­lar vein, as wild and unpre­dictable as ado­les­cence itself.

The sto­ry cen­tres on Aus­tri­an teenag­er Mati, who’s a few weeks shy of grad­u­at­ing from high school, and strug­gling to rec­on­cile her desires with the path set out for her by her moth­er, who assume Mati will fol­low in her vet­eri­nary foot­steps. In a scene par­tic­u­lar­ly rem­i­nis­cent of Lady Bird, Mati bick­ers with her moth­er over a suit­able grad­u­a­tion dress – being a tomboy, she dis­likes the girly num­ber Mum has picked out for her. In fact, she’s hap­pi­est when on her dirt bike with her gang of male mates down at the quar­ry. Or at least, so she thinks.

A chance meet­ing with an old­er girl from a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent back­ground, teamed with a rev­e­la­tion from her best friend, cause Mati to spi­ral out of con­trol, reeval­u­at­ing what’s impor­tant to her. Mueck­stein does an impres­sive job of pre­sent­ing a film about teenagers that real­ly cap­tures the dizzy­ing con­fu­sion of a girl on the verge of adult­hood, from unpleas­ant testos­terone-dri­ven fights to unglam­orous attempts to feel some­thing through recre­ation­al drug use. Mean­while, Mati’s par­ents bat­tle with their own per­son­al demons, as the nar­ra­tive diverges and becomes a trip­tych study in mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the weight of famil­ial and soci­etal expectations.

There’s also an excel­lent musi­cal moment undoubt­ed­ly inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Mag­no­lia, fea­tur­ing Fran­co Battiato’s 1985 Ital­ian pop song, L’Animale. It’s a non-sequitur that doesn’t fit at all with the film’s pump­ing elec­tro-synth sound­track, but it’s odd­ly charm­ing all the same, as is the per­for­mance giv­en by a cat (named Her­bert) who dons a styl­ish blue body­suit for most of the movie.

It’s inten­tion­al­ly rough around the edges, mir­ror­ing the char­ac­ter of Mati, per­formed with a teenage per­ma-scowl by Sophie Stockinger. Yet you feel for Mati too, so at odds with the world she inhab­its, brought up in a house where no one talks about their feel­ings, and every­thing feels like the Aus­tri­an equiv­a­lent of Step­ford. The plot itself might not bring much new mate­r­i­al to the table, but sol­id per­for­mances from the cast teamed with Mueckstein’s fresh-feel­ing vision are enough to hold one’s inter­est throughout.