These could be actual physical structures – beautiful and grand (or ugly and grand) buildings (The Brutalist), or immense statues. Or art – Bob Dylan’s epoch-altering songs (A Complete Unknown). Or our religious conceits – intense discussions about the legacy of a just-deceased pope, and what message the successor’s appointment should send the world (Conclave).
Yet, my favourite of this year’s Oscar-plated films is one that’s concerned with how temporary all our monuments can be – even though they seem so significant and long-lasting on a human timescale. I went into the Latvian film, Flow – winner for Best Animated Feature – knowing it would probably appeal to me because it bypasses the anthropocentric worldview, being set in an apparently post-human world where a motley group of animals and birds contend with climate change.
But I wasn’t fully prepared for the mesmerising visuals and elegiac background music composed by director Gints Zilbalodis; images of floodwaters effortlessly covering the highest man-made structures and tallest trees; traces of Ozymandias-like hubris everywhere, but not a person in sight.
Most of all, there is the film’s decision to have the animals communicate purely as animals – at least in terms of them not talking to each other. There are scenes – two rescue operations, for instance – that take the narrative forward by having the characters engage in human-like deliberation and planning.
But a few other moments that might seem contrived or cutesy – e.g. a lemur meditating with hands spread out, or being possessive of the trinkets it has found – are rooted in real-life behaviour of these creatures.The central figure in this story of survival and adaptation is a grey cat who is observer, anchor, and our point of identification. It’s remarkable how much has been achieved with this character who barely has any ‘personality’ as we’d normally define that term. The cat’s standard expression is a wide-eyed, fearful contemplation – punctuated by little mews – of everything going on in this watery landscape, and the new creatures it has to interact with. There are a nice couple of moments where it is shown tapping into its essential ‘cat-ness’ – sharpening its claws on the side of a boat, knocking something off a higher surface to the ground, playfully grabbing the lemur’s long tail. But this apart, it is mainly a spectator, who gets by on luck as much as initiative. Curiosity actually keeps this cat alive. I came to see it as a version of deadpan meister Buster Keaton, navigating crisis after crisis, more bemused than heroic.
But I also felt a kinship between Flow’s cat and the young Bob Dylan played by Timothee Chalamet in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. Both are protagonists, everything pivots around them, they both move forward, and the story follows them. And yet they are ciphers too, chronicling their times while also maintaining a detachment, an unwillingness to get too involved with the things everyone else around them is preoccupied with.
The early-1960s folk music in A Complete Unknown is about very human concerns – the civil rights movement, the addressing of many forms of social injustice. Flow’s beautiful background score on the other hand, is like a majestic cosmic symphony, a tribute to the continuing glories of a world that may not have any people left.
Such a comparison can be misleading, because its score did, after all, come from a human mind too. As did the sense of lament that runs through this beautiful film.
However, it might be said that the greatest music in Flow is the undiluted sound of the natural world: water flowing gently or roaring by, animals and birds making their own urgent noises rather than speaking in human voices. A celestial score that would be beyond the efforts of even a Dylan.
