Mandy (Billie Piper) and Pete (Leo Bill) are in a restaurant on a date; they spit venom across the white tablecloth. Pete finds “women in the main, intolerable”, complains that these days they want “less intimacy, more head” and “have more testosterone coursing through their veins than blood”. Mandy for her part says quietly, “You’re going to rape me tonight, aren’t you? Those are classic rapist remarks.” And we’re only just through the credits of Billie Piper’s wild directorial debut.
‘Anti-romcom’, as the film’s been labelled, doesn’t quite cover it. Rare Beasts doesn’t so much lightly skewer love and romance as take a big old bulldozer to every corner of modern life. An investigation into whether you can be a feminist if you admit to wanting a man expands its focus to masculinity, the myth of having it all, self-help, the coarse rhythms of family life and the rage that throbs for all of us. Put simply: the utter confusion and conflict at the heart of our messy, modern lives. Can we get off yet?
Visually and stylistically, Piper makes audacious choices.
It was written several years before I Hate Suzie (which Piper co-created), but the lineage is clear. Suzie and Mandy could be sisters, or probably (more likely) caustic cousins who get hammered and upend the buffet table, vol-au-vents flying. Pete (aka Jordan Peterson Lite) is every brutal, insecure, bitter guy, who can’t help but be mean when he’s hurt (and as Mandy points out: “You’re hurt all of the time”). And David Thewlis and Kerry Fox supply the unexpected heart to the film as Mandy’s estranged — though once clearly in love — parents.
Visually and stylistically, Piper makes audacious choices. Her film is highly stylised and abstract, from the production design (small rooms with seemingly impossible angles) to the shot choices (extreme wides when characters are speaking; straight-on close-ups that are claustrophobically tight). There’s fantasy, theatre, musical interludes and some excellent tap-dancing. The result is that you’re left spinning and breathless, much like Mandy herself.
An artist’s intent is a funny thing. Often, it’s known only to you: others can’t peer into your brain or belly. By the same token, a lack of intent is hard to know, if not impossible. Still, there can be an assumption that first-time filmmakers, that first-time female filmmakers, work from a place of accident and chance. Many of the festival reviews of Rare Beasts claim that the writer, director and star bites off more than she can chew; that she doesn’t have a handle on the chaos she creates.
It’s an assumption that simply cannot be squared with the film on screen. With the very specific choices that Piper makes as a filmmaker. None of them obvious, none of them easy; not all of them land. But do not mistake this slice of nihilistic, dark-as-all-hell, tumultuous cinema for anything other than a deliberate expression of the mess we’re all in.
