Seules les betes (2019)

Directed by: Dominik Moll | 116 minutes | crime, drama | Actors: Denis Ménochet, Laure Calamy, Damien Bonnard, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Bastien Bouillon, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Jenny Bellay, Fred Ulysse, Roland Plantin, Colin Niel, Nathalie Lopez, David Faure, Bruno Canredon, Perline Eyombwan, Juliet Doucet, Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’ N’Drin, Marie Victoire Amie, Sondé Younoussa, Désiré Konan

A dark cyclist with a goat on his neck, the French countryside, an adulterous peasant woman, Philip Glass-esque haggling, a man who talks to corpses: ‘Seul les bêtes’ teems with contrivance in the opening phase. We may be prejudiced as a French soul from another life, but this film seems to want to imitate abroad in a bizarre way. French Fargo?

History is interwoven by a missing woman (Bruni Tedeschi) as in ‘Babel’, that other art house classic. That should also be possible in France, you might say. But ‘Seul les bêtes’ – excellent title otherwise, doesn’t seem to know how to present itself to the viewer. As a whodunit? Oh no? Well half an hour into the road, this could just as easily be an episode of ‘Midsomer Murders’.

There is again a touch of art house. After some dragging with a corpse, even a life song follows. And some steamy lesbian sex can also be added, director Dominik Moll (‘Lemming’) must have thought. This is also called juxtaposition: consciously looking for opposites. The undersigned thinks: ‘Look, I went to film school’.

When a female character appears on the scene, a sex scene is imminent. The irritation is already aroused by the adultery story of Alice (Calamy), who has a boring husband (Ménochet) with an ailing farm and who goes off Wippenstein with the police officer who is looking for the missing woman.

It must be said that the acting is good in ‘Seul les bêtes’ and the cinematography (including wide landscapes in the department of Lozère) is more than okay. When context is shown via flashbacks, the whole thing starts to come to life a bit more, although in the second half the film gets bogged down in endless chatter and now and then it collapses like a soufflé. ‘Seul les bêtes’ ultimately never becomes more than a krimi, a pretentious krimi; they are French after all.