Piaffe

Nothing is phoned in here, everything is calibrated to a unique frequency so that even though you can trace the influence of Bette Gordon, Catherine Breillat, and Lucille Hadzhihalillovic, “Piaffe” is its own playful and majestic beast.

It rewards the attention of a committed voyeur, which all proper cineastes and many of our best provocateurs are anyway. The pinched of mind and the humorless need not bother. Invariably more welcome (one imagines Oren thinking) are those who enjoy their senses and perspectives pried open while their heads get a thorough scratching.

Its experimental style, marked by long, dialogue-free stretches, color flares and pristine sound effects, can seem calculated and off-putting, the narrative slight and dramatically slack. Yet the film’s provocations have a playfulness and generosity that are enormously appealing.

It’s a weird movie, to be sure, but never an off-putting one. It’s also one that sometimes feels like a chimera itself, pushing various genres and ideas together without fully synthesizing them. But it’s consistently beautiful, watchable, and a truly memorable debut for Oren.

This is the kind of movie Piaffe is: one that mostly poises its absurd surreality at the edge of what’s plausible in contemporary everyday life until it moves into unprecedented physical mutations.

Piaffe is an enrapturing, ultimately inconsistent work where two halves that challenge in different ways don’t entirely add to an effective whole. Yet the journey itself more than compensates for where it eventually lands.

The fact that it purports to function as a not-so-thinly-veiled parable about the limitlessness of sexuality, gender fluidity, and the marginalized makes it that much more unbearable.