‘Piaffe’ Review: Pony Play

The clicks and whirs of a big, peep show-like contraption often known as a zoetrope fill our ears as an enigmatic botanist (Sebastian Rudolph) observes the picture of a slowly unfurling fern. Watching him is Eva (Simone Bucio), a timid younger girl for whom sound has turn out to be one thing of an obsession.

Her nonbinary sibling, Zara, performed by Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, has had a breakdown, and Eva should take over Zara’s job as a Foley artist for a drug firm industrial. She should be taught to make the sounds of a horse prancing in place, a dressage transfer often known as a piaffe.

With “Piaffe,” the filmmaker and visible artist Ann Oren, extrapolating from her 2020 quick movie “Passage,” has made a silken examine of bodily and erotic transformation. Like the horse that stars within the industrial, Eva exists in a type of stasis, restrained from transferring ahead.

Learning to imitate equine habits emboldens her, and her physique responds by sprouting a fleshy appendage that grows quickly from a penile protuberance to a full-length tail. Timid not, Eva pursues a sequence of erotic encounters with the botanist, who tells her that ferns are hermaphrodites: Like Zara, they embody greater than a single gender.

Gorgeously shot by Carlos Vasquez utilizing 16-millimeter movie (and filmed partly within the well-known Warsaw Fotoplastikon), “Piaffe” is ideologically summary and beguilingly bizarre. Its experimental fashion, marked by lengthy, dialogue-free stretches, colour flares and pristine sound results, can appear calculated and off-putting, the narrative slight and dramatically slack. Yet the movie’s provocations have a playfulness and generosity which might be enormously interesting. In the identical method because the fern, Eva has unfurled from a defensive crouch to an open embrace of who she was meant to be.

Piaffe
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters.