When a person grows wings, it is usually a metaphor. Someone rises to a new level, achieves an unexpected quality, goes beyond their limits. In the current series “Mrs. Davis”, “wings” are an ambiguous characteristic that an artificial intelligence gives when people fit particularly well into the balance of the algorithms. They then “fly” just high enough that no one would be tempted to orientate themselves on them. A very successful company for canned drinks has turned the idea of wings into its slogan, which, with cute cartoon characters, finally took away the mythical grandeur that the dream of (non-jet-powered) flight still had in the legend of Daedalus and Icarus.
Thomas Cailley's film “Animalia” could also be understood as a legend. And it definitely contains a powerful metaphor.
When it comes to the wings, however, he is very specific. Painfully specific. It's about the skeleton, about the shoulder blades, about the back muscles and about something pushing out from inside a person that contains a different nature. An animal that tries to take shape with crashes and cracks, while a person doesn't know whether he is losing himself or gaining a new dimension.
The crown of creation?
“Animalia” takes place in France. In the first scene we see François (Romain Duris) and his son Émile (Paul Kircher) in a car. You're stuck in a traffic jam, there's a stir because of an ambulance in which something is rumbling or raging. For a few seconds we then see the first of these creatures that “Animalia” tells about. A bird-like creature that immediately runs away. In French the title is “La règne animal”, i.e. “The Kingdom of the Animals”. The word “règne” is important because it contains many layers of meaning. People live in their own kingdom, animals in another. They are each sovereign in their realms, but the realms are in conflict. Historically, kingdoms or empires often strived for religious legitimacy, so this is also a hint of something like the ultimate foundation of an order that was long understood as the order of creation. With humans as the crown of creation.
Thomas Cailley is now playing through a reversal of this ideology (based on a script he wrote with Pauline Munier). “Animalia” is about a society in which mutations are becoming increasingly common. People transform, acquire traits, physiognomic characteristics and behavior from animals. So does Lana, Émile's mother, François' wife – she, like most of these creatures, is only seen for a moment, rather in a hint, she looks as if she had fallen out of a science fiction saga, but there is also something genuinely strange, mysterious, unattainable. If humanity is a family, as was once celebrated in the term “family of man”, then François, Lana and Émile are now a test case – can a family continue to exist if it suddenly contains an unknown species? So what if it goes beyond the human? Or maybe falls behind what is human?
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