(Ann Oren, Germany, 2022, 86 minutes)
Berlin visual artist and filmmaker Ann Oren's erotic fairytale of sexual awakening is an appealingly odd film based around an audacious premise.
Eva (Mexican actress Simone Bucio, who has the serene face of Elina Löwensohn and the graceful, svelte form of Charlotte Gainbourg) works as a sound designer, somewhat akin to Toby Jones in Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio, except she's really just a fill-in for the non-binary Zara (German-Columbian actor and filmmaker Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau).
After her volatile sibling ends up in a mental institute for an indeterminate period of time, Eva takes it upon herself to complete their assignment, a Foley track for a commercial touting the mood stabilizer Equili, which features an actress in a stable, caring for and trotting on a horse (Jones's Berberian character also spends time working on a project, The Equestrian Vortex, with a horse-centric name). Using wooden boxes filled with hay, sand, and other substances, Eva turns to shoes as a percussive device and bites on a metal chain to duplicate the sound of a bit.
Now, when she revisits the Foley track, she does so with greater understanding, essentially becoming the horse. This sound designer version of method acting leaves her feeling literally itchy as reality bleeds into fantasy, because the sensation signifies a new growth at the base of her spine. Unusually, it has her feeling more intrigued than perturbed.
Though she eventually visits a specialist who takes a series of X-rays, she doesn't stick around for a diagnosis or treatment plan. The lack of surprise on the doctor's face when she sees the fleshy growth jutting from her patient's posterior says a lot about this film's cool tone, despite Carlos Vasquez's warmly-lit, soft-edged, 16mm cinematography.
In Stephen Frears' The Queen, the director portrays the royal leader as a woman who grew up isolated from quotidian life, making normal human interactions especially challenging. There's a remarkable sequence outside Balmoral in which Helen Mirren's QE2 locks eyes with a magnificent stag, and it's as if she's met the one creature in the world with whom she truly feels a connection, no matter how fleeting. In his Oscar-nominated screenplay, Peter Morgan wisely avoids any analysis or explanation.
That, to some extent, is what the horse in the Equili commercial becomes for Eva.
After all, a horse can't throw things at her, which Zara does when they finally consent to see her. Zara, who also has long dark hair, is as much a representation of Eva's bolder, shadow self as a blood relation.
In her new, more extroverted incarnation, Eva pays a visit to Dr. Novak's Botanical Institute, but he expresses little interest until she turns around, and he notices the full-sized tail she has made no effort to disguise. He's as blasé as the doctor, but also possibly turned on, and a unique sexual relationship ensues in which he handles her body the way he does his hermaphroditic ferns. It's sadomasochistic, and that's what she wants.
It's also less heteronormative than it may at first appear, since the growth beneath Eva's tail is very, very phallic. As Oren told Movieweb, "I mean, she's also inter-species in the end; she's intersex and inter-species."
Reality and fantasy continue to entwine as overhead lights flicker on and off and äbvsd's thumping techno music from the disco takes over the soundtrack even when Eva is just walking around town or riding the bus. She also imagines that Zara is spying on her assignations with the doctor--and maybe they are.
Piaffe, which expands on Oren's 2020 short Passage, isn't half as dark as Lynn Stopkewich's Kissed or Jane Campion's In the Cut, but it also centers a woman who can't feel pleasure--she can't even feel alive--without stepping way outside the bounds of convention. In those other films, it's through illicit and/or dangerous predilections like sex with the recently demised or potentially psychopathic, though Eva, like Molly Parker's funeral worker, prefers physical sensations to emotional entanglements.
Though the actors play it straight, and though there's nothing overtly humorous about the tone of the film, Oren and Brazilian co-writer Thais Guisasola embrace the ridiculousness built into the premise--though they avoid the groan-worthy horse puns dominating a few too many reviews.
As in Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio and Flux Gourmet, Oren uses sound as precisely as her central character. The score, primarily cello scrapings from Daniela Lunelli, aka Munsha, plays a secondary role to the sounds of brushing, clomping, and the squeaking of leather. Adding to the aesthetic appeal, Carlos Vasquez's tactile, yet dreamy cinematography brings Polish filmmakers Andrej Żuławski and Krzysztof Kieślowski to mind--specifically Possession and the Three Colors trilogy--in the way he uses intense, saturated reds (blood, roses, lipstick) and blues (disco lights, dresses). The colors become more vibrant in concert with the character.
Like Matthew Barney before her, Oren comes from the art world, and in interviews, she makes it clear that she has no intention of trading art for filmmaking, but rather continuing to work in both forms—and combining the two when possible. She's currently planning a third film, a short in the Passage/Piaffe series, and also preparing a second narrative feature.
As for Simone Bucio, I had no idea she wasn't German until after I watched the film. I never would've guessed. Granted, there's relatively little dialogue, but she blends in with the German cast. Like the actresses I mentioned at the outset, Elina Löwensohn and Charlotte Gainsbourg, she appears to share the same willingness to do whatever an adventurous, if supportive filmmaker asks of her. In the 2016 Mexican film Untamed, for instance, which takes direct inspiration from Possession--I'm sensing a pattern here--she plays a character who makes love with a sort of outer space squid.
Odd as it may be, the visually and sonically ravishing Piaffe--give or take the thumping techno--is the opposite of tragic or scary. Whether together or separately: I can't wait to see what Ann Oren and Simone Bucio do next.
Piaffe opens Sept 22 at The Grand Illusion. Images from Indiewire (Simone Bucio), IMDb via the 2022 Locarno Film Festival, Verleih (Bucio and Bjørn Melhus), Screen Slate (Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paeta), critic.de (Bucio and Sebastian Rudolph), and Senses of Cinema (Bucio).
