This film is not about carnal passion, as one might think from the title. And not about the relationship of the sexes in the wild. And not even about the love of people for our smaller brothers, although pets in this film with abundance - they are squeezed, kissed, trusted with their secrets, begging with them, jealous, abandoned on the road, arrange expensive funerals, which not every person will be honored.
This sobering and rather misanthropic film is not about our relationships with pets, but about ourselves – through the way we use them. We use dogs, rabbits, ferrets - the heroes of this film (and for some reason no cats), look more like victims than like pets. Victims forced to endure any whim and stupidity of the owners. Animals are here exclusively for furniture – only to show through them people, often socially flawed, lonely, poorly adapted to life in the environment of their kind. They are untenable in society (although not all of them are poor), and they need communication, so they find a replacement in the form of live toys with which you can do what you want, take out your pain, resentment, trouble on them. They fight, they get divorced, they tell animals how bad their exes are. Hugs - because their hugs are not enough. Well, animals just suffer all this poor. What else can they do?
A very unusual film, shot in the genre of pseudo-documentary, when it seems that a purely documentary film is shown (although no documentary film can be so candid). Actors probably play themselves in natural conditions, and most of them are people living in poverty – the most vivid, memorable and repetitive image is generally a young bum with a rabbit; there are two poor old men who took a dog in a shelter; there is some strange young couple with even stranger relationships; there is a woman with a ferret whose husband is an alcoholic; there are two runaway spouses who take away a dog from each other; there are survivors of the grandmothers in the shelter who were given each a rabbit, so they are with these rabbits and they are sitting in the whole film.
How this was actually filmed is completely incomprehensible to me, because Seidl managed to erase the line between documentary and feature films. It is even more unclear how people allowed themselves to be photographed in this way. But they seem to be real people. Saidl himself: 'When I made Animal Love, I saw so much, you can imagine... in every apartment I visited. Sometimes it was just unbearable. However, initially it would be a dead end option to start working on the film, feeling sorry for the characters. Pity is not the most successful prerequisite for a director.
To be honest, I have a very different view of people. But I was really shocked to see us like this. And now, when the cat Smurf comes to kiss me in the morning, I’m horrified to think that I probably have a lot of these characters in me too.
It is done skillfully and causes a strong emotional response. It makes you think.