Bestiaire

Bestiaire argues persuasively without words, making a case without explicating one at all.

The film has a meditative calm about it — there are only a few murmured words of French but nothing that could be called dialogue — with also some underlying tension, because as you look at the animals, they so often look back, their inscrutable consciousness both placid and unyielding.

This may not be a fuzzy wuzzy, warm-and-cuddly song to animals, but in revealing the everyday, sometimes repellent surrealism of the park - where zebras, elephants, camels and ostriches walk among slowly moving cars, and lions bang wildly against their small cages - he forces you to look at the often unseen. It may not be pretty, but it is essential viewing.

There's a compulsion to describe a film with such a slow and unusual pace as poetic - it already has a Netflix blurb calling it "lyrical" - but Bestiaire's best quality is its unpretentiousness.

Bestiaire is, most profoundly, about the dynamics of looking, an exercise in studying gazes that are either unidirectional or, superficially, at least, reciprocated.

The images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much.

Tediousness sets in eventually; there's only so much zoological abyss-gazing one can do.