Animal wrangling at Cannes

An entertaining story by New York Times critic AO Scott rounds up of all the animals in films at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Writes Scott: "There sure were a lot of dogs."

• In Mondovino, a documentary about winemaking, which features "a charming English bulldog, whose flatulence unfortunately interrupts a discussion of Bordeaux, California and the politics of terroir". That film, by the way, won the "Palm Dog" award that is given by a group of critics.
• But, according to Scott, that dog was upstaged by the basset hound in Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.
• Getting to Thai film, there's a cute puppy in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's jury prize winner, Tropical Malady.
• And a scary attack dog in the Italian thriller Consequences of Love.
• Stray mutts wander around in films from Serbia (Emir Kusturica's Life Is a Miracle) Senegal (Ousmane Sembene's Moolaade) and Lebanon (On the Field of Battle).
• The presence of a black lab "without any clear narrative or thematic function" in Olivier Assayas' Clean, made Scott "suspect that dogs were actually an entry requirement."

There were other animals, too:

• Ducks thunder across the screen in Abbas Kiarostami's Five. "They were virtually the only things in that slow, austere motion picture that actually moved," Scott writes.
• He continues: "Speaking of ducks, what about Duck Season, a well-received Mexican entry in the Director's Fortnight program? And how about the helpful talking monkey in Tropical Malady, and the poor goat slaughtered on camera in real time in the Argentine movie Los Muertos?"
• Don't forget Puss in Boots and Donkey in Shrek 2, the martyred goldfish (as well as the black mamba snake!) in Kill Bill Vol 2 or the giant horse in Troy.
• There's animal carnage as well. In Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, there's a banquet of snake at a Hong Kong restaurant. The social-climbing novelist in Agnès Jaoui's Look at Me tries to ingratiate himself with a more famous colleague by pretending to like rabbit. The lovelorn young men in the Korean film Woman Is the Future of Man console themselves with liquor and chicken. And the hero of another Korean film, Park Chan Wook's Old Boy, who has been fed nothing but fried dumplings during 15 years of imprisonment, celebrates his freedom by consuming a live octopus at a sushi bar. A dead cow figures somehow into the plot of Tropical Malady.
• Animals exacted revenge: Sam Fuller's 1980 war picture, The Big Red One, which was restored and screened at Cannes, begins with Lee Marvin being attacked by a horse.
• There is animal-like behavior among the humans. "The two young men whose delicate romance dominates the first half of Tropical Malady consummate their affection by licking each other's hands," writes Scott.
• More about Tropical Malady: Apichatpong told reporters he had originally filmed an expensive and elaborate sex scene between a man and a tiger, only to leave it on the cutting room floor. Whether its inclusion would have helped or hurt the film's reception - it was greeted with fascination, irritation and heavy sleep - is hard to say, but it might have at least given the tiger a shot at an acting prize.

"But happily," writes Scott, "the animals of Cannes were not entirely neglected at the award ceremony. "When Old Boy won the Grand Prix, its star, Choi Min-Sik, paid tribute to some of his co-stars -- the ones he had eaten. 'I'd like to thank the four octopuses who gave their lives to help make this film,' he said."