If you remember Andrew Kotting’s Gallivant (a tour round the English coastline with his mother) and This Filthy Earth (a latter-day Cold Comfort Farm), you may know roughly what to expect from Ivul, made in the French Pyrenees and in French because that was the only way to find the money.
He is, like those other British exiles Ben Hopkins and Peter Strickland, the kind of challenging film-maker for whom adequate British funding should exist but frequently doesn’t.
This is the story of a young man (Jacob Auzanneau) who, found tampering mildly with his sister (Adelaide Leroux), is expelled from his country home by his furious Russian father (Jean-Luc Bideau) and vows never to return. He takes to the trees and won’t come back in again. Meanwhile his sister ventures off to Russia, returning to find her father comatose after a stroke and her mother (Aurelia Petit) succumbing to drink.
The film is by no means an orthodox narrative but a kind of free-flowing artwork that chronicles the breakdown of a close-knit family as if remembered as a dim and distant past. You’ll either be bored or fascinated. But that is Kotting’s way with audiences. He doesn’t much care for compromise and expresses what he wants in the way he knows best.
Ivul
Cert: 15
