L’animale (2018)

Directed by: Katharina Mückstein | 96 minutes | drama | Actors: Sophie Stockinger, Kathrin Resetarits, Dominik Warta, Julia Franz Richter, Jack Hofer, Dominic Marcus Singer, Simon Morzé, Stefan Pohl, Christoph Bittenauer, Lucia Zamora Campos. Eva Herzig

The Austrian ‘L’animale’ is about the seventeen-year-old Mati (an incomparable Sophie Stockinger), who grows up in a boring village for teenagers in a beautiful area of ​​Austria. There is not much to do for young people, but the tough Mati has found her niche in the group of boys, with whom she competes on her dirt bike and who wins gloriously. Between smoking weed, drinking beer and going out, Mati also works as an assistant in her mother’s veterinary practice and is studying for her final exam.

There isn’t all that much sensational about the plot of ‘L’animale’. Katharina Mueckstein, director and writer, and whose first film ‘Talea’ also had Stockinger in the lead role, however, manages to keep what at first sight seems standard coming-of-age story, continuously fascinating. Although the viewer already senses many of the developments (the problem that arises between Mati’s parents, for example), the emotional stakes are high and the occasionally lethargic attitude of the characters is deceptive.

What’s great about this is that Mati isn’t even a nice protagonist, but you still want to keep investing in her development. Most of the time she behaves horribly, like in an early scene in the only nightlife the village apparently knows. When a boy from her group of friends becomes pawing at a peer, apparently his ex, and doesn’t know how to stop, Mati goes one step further. In ‘L’animale’ nothing of ‘women for women’ and the #metoo movement seems to have completely missed the Austrian village. But against every monstrous act of Mati there is a very tender one: her love for animals, her vulnerability that she shows most often in the presence of her father: you can feel everything that this is a teenager in two minds. Because no matter how tough and rude she is, she is also very often just a child who does not yet know what the consequences of her actions are.

The second storyline about Mati’s parents is equally interesting. In fact, the marriage has already broken down even though the two themselves do not know. The fact that no knots are cut – that also applies to Mati – will feel ‘unfinished’ for some viewers, but it is precisely for that reason more of a slice-of-life than similar films, in which everything can go into jugs after the necessary outbursts. and pitchers. What is not taken from life, is the special fragment in which the main characters – each at an emotional breaking point – sing along with the ballad L’animale by the Italian Franco Battiato (“the animal inside me makes me not happy , it makes me a slave to my passions”). Beautiful film about growing up, expectations of others and the fear of going against them.