Film Review: Go with the “Flow”
By Peter Keough
Few filmmakers have been able to capture the essence of water in its most intimate and destructive aspects.
Flow. Directed by Gints Zilbalodis. Screens at the Alamo Drafthouse, the Boston Common, Coolidge Corner Theatre, and in the suburbs.
In the first image in Latvian filmmaker and animator Gints Zilbalodis’s otherworldly, wordless, and triumphant animated film Flow, a cat ponders its reflection in a pool of water. He (gender is not much of an issue in the film, but in interviews the director identifies the cat as male) doesn’t have long to do so because soon a rabbit — chased by a pack of dogs — dashes past, disrupting the surface of the pool. They run on by, and safe for now, the cat wanders off into a lush glade decorated with sculptures — of cats. They range from life size to towering and monumental and lead to a house with a broken window. He slips inside and onto a cozy bed where, being a cat, he promptly falls asleep.
Perchance to dream?
His repose proves short-lived, as next he is seen wandering a forest that is idyllic except for an odd detail like a boat hanging from a tree limb. The dogs return, and so begins the first of many chases and narrow escapes worthy of Buster Keaton. Including a deluge — a world-erasing tsunami, and not the last.
Animated with an acute, loving detail (those eyes! and the richly expressive vocalizations) that will make any cat owner’s heart quake, the feline hero might not have nine lives but the creature sure comes close. At first desperately alone and fearful of others, he eventually gathers up a crew of fellow animal survivors who take ark-like refuge on a battered felucca. These include an eager-to-please golden retriever (one of the less raffish of the pack of dogs), a stolid capybara, and an anal lemur who obsessively collects artifacts and trinkets from what remains of whatever civilization has been lost.
And then there’s the secretary bird, a big predator who, normally, would classify a cute little kitty as a choice morsel, but who spares the terrified feline (the eyes!) in a sequence as touching and unlikely as the dinosaur scene in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011). Its compassion costs it dearly, but the fowl gets to take over the helm of the vessel from the steady and capable but not especially imaginative capybara. Clearly there is an allegory at work here, but of a limpid, exhilarating kind — not politically corrosive like Animal Farm, but far from the platitudes doled out by most other studio animation these days. These animals retain their otherness but also evoke the universality of suffering, struggle, compassion, and the longing for release.
As for humans, only the ruins remain — monoliths, cat sculptures (and one submerged colossus), drowned cities, and the relics collected by the lemur. It’s like the best episode ever of the 2009 TV mini-series Life Without People. Who is to blame for the cataclysms? Refreshingly, perhaps, the film does not rely on the traditional environmental villains; instead, it poses the phenomenon as natural and primordial — indeed, there are enough catastrophic convulsions in 85 minutes to fill millions of years of geological transformation.
That plus some of the most mind-boggling and arresting imagery to be seen onscreen this year. Few filmmakers have been able to capture the essence of water in its most intimate and destructive aspects. And, in addition to all the precisely rendered earthly creatures, Zilbalodis includes a Leviathan-like beast with lots of odd fins and attachments that looks like a cross between an iguana, a Greenland shark, and the beast in Cloverfield (2008), along with a visionary tunnel of light that leads perhaps to some version of Buddhist annihilation. The choice seems to be between that and the chaos surging below, with maybe the consolation of one’s reflection, surrounded by companions, glimpsed in a pool of water.
Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
Thanks for identifying the lemur and capybara. I had no idea what the hell they were. And, yes, the best animation film of the year by far.
What about the secretary bird? And thanks!