Before you start watching this movie, learn one simple thing: France is terrified of rats. Any adult man can hysterically squeal (I swear!). I saw it with my own eyes!, having met this harmless, in fact, animal somewhere under the bridge. The image of the rat is a kind of French archetype, a symbol of everything from which you want to escape, hide, dig deeper; apparently, when you meet it in the soul of every Frenchman with a kind of Loch Ness monster, the dark part of the subconscious surfaces and the Horror awakens. And now imagine: the father of an extremely respectable bourgeois (oh, this fashionable word came out ...) family brings this to his household one not very beautiful evening.
All. Now look at this. Do you know where everything that happens next comes from? Ozone thoughtfully unwinds the web nesting deep inside each hero; and so the quiet teenage nerd turns into a self-confident homosexual, the infantile daughter thoughtfully comes out of the window at night and, deprived of the opportunity to walk, discovers a light BDSM - and at the same time dislike her fiancé ... And the father of the family, before everything indifferent, like a cold steak in the refrigerator, finds in himself something that you better see with your own eyes, spoiler is not good.
Keep in mind one more thing: this is not a comedy, not a drama or a thriller. It's a traghifarce. Ozone here is like Gogol with his “Nose”, or Saltykov-Shchedrin with “The History of a City”; the level of grotesque and symbolism is about the same.
There is no need to talk about acting; all are 100 points out of 90. It's Ozone, he doesn't work with anyone. And yes, the remaining nameless rat was also on top!
Bottom line: the rat is beautiful. Francois Ozon is a genius. The banquet will take place in any weather.
I didn't see anything funny. The film is a satire on modern, more European society, but it is not at all humorous, embittered, primitive, frank spit - but this is one side of the coin, too obvious, which is even boring to think about.
The viewer sees a family of a bourgeois mindset. Gray and dull, and most importantly stretched. Everything is changed by a new pet - a rat, because of which, well or thanks, all sorts of vices are revealed. Life wakes up, yes, it is monstrous in its abnormality, but it is better than endless vegetation.
This is what happens when a family member is no longer a member. Preservation of feelings, falsification of emotions and complete misunderstanding of what is happening, this is the lot of people around him. He is like that rat, only without a cage and also pushes people to "feats".
I wish everyone a pleasant viewing!!
Ratnik is an unusual and shocking film by French director Francois Ozon. This film turned out to be a crazy, unpleasant and discouraging story. This director has movies that I love, but this movie didn’t impress me. We see a house in which a crazy family lives: a father who does not care what is happening around, a mother who tries to pretend that their family is normal, a son who recently learned that he is a homosexual, a daughter who is sadistic and has lost her taste for life, her boyfriend who is at the peak of love activity, a maid who is extremely brazen and hot woman. In their house there was a rat, and with the appearance of it, everyone went crazy.
We see in this film both same-sex love and incest with different kinds of existence, adultery, infidelity, terrible thoughts, murder and a mutant rat. In the process of watching this film, the viewer is waiting for a real shock and various abominations, which Ozon completely imbued with his provocative and forbidden film. The genre of this film is black, goofy comedy, but there are really a couple of funny moments, and so everything was unpleasant and stupid, so the movie turned out empty. The cast was modest, and I didn’t particularly like anyone, unless the actress played the mother of the family Evelyn Dundry and the boyfriend of her daughter Stefan Rideau. Just these two actors.
What audience is this movie for? What did the director want to reveal in this comedy? If you laugh, then somehow it did not work out, because everything was stupid and really stupid. The second time I wouldn’t watch this movie.
You know, I don’t like European cinema, of course, there are European films that I like, but there are very few of them, I was pushed to see this film by a non-trivial story that looks like a thrash, but I thought it might be interesting, and the name of the director inspired some trust and fear at the same time, in general I decided to watch.
The downsides came from all the cracks from the very beginning, literally from the first shots, this completely inappropriate directorial move, in which we will know how the film ends at the very beginning, and this sometimes happens in films, but here it was too inappropriate and I lost interest in what is happening from the very beginning. Then followed by terrible camera work, disgusting scenes, crazy and boring action and can continue for a long time.
Initially, the director wanted to gently hint that absolutely all people are perverts and crazy, but are forced to suppress their vicious desires and desires due to the limitations of this world, this opinion can be agreed with, or you can not agree, not in this matter, the fact is that the film is shot disgusting and bad, this creation is nothing, it is not even an art house in the classical sense, there is no artistic value and no aesthetic pleasure you will not get from this film, I have a feeling that the more disgusting the better.
I absolutely do not want to dwell on the actors and their characters, none of them arouses sympathy in me, and when this happens, I do not like the film, perhaps it should be, but each character of this film is deeply unpleasant to me, but the actors are all, in general, well done, I will not single out anyone.
In the end, absolutely crazy, in a bad way, a film without a gram of soul and taste, the only thing that impresses me in the film is the idea and the attempt to convey it, only that’s why the color of this review is not red, it’s still good that there are people in the world who have ideas in their head and who they are able to so bravely and unsuccessfully implement.
Having chosen a reliable way to attract attention - shocking ordinary minds with modern sexual taboos, the once novice French director loudly declared himself through several prestigious film festivals, deliberately provocative and paradoxical stylistic techniques reflected the actual contradictions of social reality, the fall of the moral foundations of Western civilization, however, hardly perceptible by the viewer in contrast to the remarkable scandalous intrafamily relations of the film's heroes. Ozon’s fascinated antinomy of the aesthetic and moral is lost in his obsessive admiration of all sorts of human perversions, the desire for a daring provocation, so well succeeded that ridiculing the vices of bourgeois society has turned into a superficial and, moreover, absurd theatrical action.
Characteristic for situational comedies, the insanity of all members of the nuclear family, built on meaningless plot collisions of their misadventures, the director achieves a caricature distortion of the features of the ideological paradigm of the West, the hyperbolized consequences of the liberal dictatorship determines the future of supporters of unlimited rights and freedoms, threatening a person not only with the controversial advantages of the principle of individualism, but also with the crisis of kinship caused by the desire for independence. Under the influence of the experimental rat, the helpless metaphor of Ozon, the absolute idyll of prosperous bourgeois is violated by tolerance that contradicts moral values, by the unjustified indifference of the heads of the family to the gradual decay of morals that condone the preference of heroes for subjective social norms.
The main provisions of Freudian theories are the only possible explanation for the behavior of the characters, at the same time, a futile search for causal connections, because the criticism of a class that has lost its prospects for development reaches its climax through a sharply satirical grotesque: prompted by the passive complicity of a domestic animal, the actors copulate with each other in order to generate the illusion of permissiveness, seek the object of sexual satisfaction in spite of the stereotypes imposed by biological determinism, in which today’s liberal necessarily sees an encroachment on the freedom of choice of life attitudes. The kitsch stylistics of the television genre, the sociocultural archetypes of parents and children used by Ozon help him to amuse the audience with such a liberal concept of the family, at the same time transform the director’s debut work into a kind of pseudo-intellectual forgery.
The European concept of “freedom” – the protection of rights, but not duties, therefore, the transformation of the French inhabitants into a herd driven by primitive instincts is not accidental, in the context of the film acquires a certain meaning, based on the opposition of the hypocritical duality of bourgeois morality and open satisfaction of social and natural needs, reveals the negative aspects of the liberalization of all spheres of social life, allowing a person no longer to hide the details of an intimate nature behind the mask of moral stability, but, like the household members presented in the film, turn even the ostentatious well-being of boring everyday life into the madness of the climaximation of sexual activity, which transforms the audience into the final traphasis.
I read reviews and wonder how superficially people watch movies. And "Ratman" - this is still not a comic book adaptation, here and think will not hurt.
What is the first full-length picture of Ozone? At first glance, and this is confirmed by the annotation, it seems that really, in the life of a pleasant, venerable family, a simple and sweet animal brings confusion - a rat that the father of the family gave to the children.
But it is worth looking closely and the white guinea pig moves aside, becoming more of a symbol than a catalyst. The family is undergoing monstrous, grotesque changes - here you have incest, and homosexuality, and BDSM, and much more. As they say, for every taste. And an attentive viewer will easily be able to recognize in this small society the current society, even if not ours, but European, of course. Democracy and tolerance rule here. Any perverse and deviant behavior is explained and, moreover, indulgence. No abnormality. Everything can be fixed or accepted.
What about Dad? It would seem that he is the only one who has not been touched by the viscous abyss of depravity. But is he, silent and invisible, by his inaction and passive observation of the horrors going on around him, not a hundred times worse than all these corrupt children, servants and wives?
Even at the end, when he finally sees and becomes a huge rat himself, trying to cleanse the family of filth, he suffers a crushing but understandable defeat - after all, this is no longer his home.
This is a worthy and courageous film that undoubtedly deserves attention.
As someone who has revisited most of Ozone, I can say that this debut feature film is still a young, but in fact a cult French director, better approached through earlier shorts. This will allow you to decide for yourself whether you are ready to tolerate such a defiant film language of Ozone, flavored with perversions of various types, or not. If not, then it probably doesn’t make sense to watch Ratsy.
In this film, Ozone seems to give some extract, a squeeze of his usual, in my opinion, deeply decorative plot moves, introduced into the narrative only to create a general oppressive atmosphere in which you can enthusiastically follow the behavior of the characters. All these moves (homosexuality, incest, sado and mazo) Ozone is placed in one form or another in almost all paintings. It forces characters to exist on the edge or even beyond the human psyche. It is important to him the reaction of the characters (and spectators) to everything that happens.
In this film, there is one very important idea developed by Ozon on the example of the mother of the family, who is first horrified by the thought of her son’s homosexuality, and then quite calmly reacts to much more powerful revelations and even provokes them by her actions. This idea, I think, is that a person is able to adapt to absolutely everything. The human psyche is a subtle, but quite reasonable matter that is able to adapt to changes in the surrounding world so that it does not adversely affect the entire body - all visible and invisible shocks are removed, forgotten or perceived as something for granted.
The name “Sitcom” (such a popular genre today) should be explained, I think, not worth it – a comedy of positions. Only in Ozon comedy is replaced by the concept of banter – healthy or unhealthy – over society, over the genre, and over the viewer.
The rat plays an important role in this film. For some reason I thought that the white rodent did not exist at all, that the rat is a metaphorical, allegorical image of the father of the family (it is no coincidence that another rat appears at the end of the film) - all this effect of the laboratory rat on the family is a pernicious, but imperceptible effect of the father on his household.
This is not my favorite Ozon film, but it is a very confident and strong picture, especially for the debut.
7 out of 10
The appearance of a small laboratory rat in a prosperous bourgeois family and the close communication of household members with animals lead to the collapse of family harmony and contribute to the rapid spread of vices. The starting point is the recognition of a young child who suddenly declared himself a homosexual during a family dinner.
But instead of the inevitable scandal, the respectable bourgeois continue to routinely absorb food and take a balanced discussion of his son’s statement, finding it fashionable and quite appropriate to the spirit of the time. Although then, for purely preventive reasons, they still send the concierge’s groom to his room, who, instead of guiding the boy on the right path, becomes the first lover of an immaculate gay man.
Soon artificially maintained harmony is replaced by general depression, revealing a deep psychological and spiritual crisis of all family members without exception. Moreover, the daughter begins to rapidly manifest sado-masochistic tendencies, aggravated by suicidal mentalities, and the mother wakes up the Electra complex, and one night she climbs into bed with her beloved son. The last fallen stronghold of stability becomes the head of the family, who decides to put an end to the destructive energy of the little animal.
1997 was a turning point for François Ozon. Following the medium-length film “See the Sea”, he shot the surrealistic tragedy of Sitcom (which we translated as “Ratman”) without respite. As a result, from the "young and promising" he quickly moved to a more weighty category - "the main national hopes."
This witty and caustic grotesque draws attention to the obvious indifference of the young French director to the indicated problem - the illusory values that determine the worldview of the modern bourgeois. Perhaps that is why Ozon’s frankly provocative debut was immediately invited to the Cannes Festival in the prestigious Criticism Week program.
Through the anti-bourgeois pathos, Sitcom makes you remember Pasolini’s Theorem, where an uninvited guest also without problems violated the status quo, and Luis Buñuel’s sarcastic humor about the “modest charm of the bourgeoisie”, and at the same time the “indecent charm of vice” in the works of Pedro Almodóvar. It is a pity that the nonconformist Ozone was enough only for a couple of “sips”. But even with the obvious shortage of “fresh air”, they did not even damage.