DIRECTED BY: Alain Fleischer
FEATURING: Catherine Jourdan, Piéral, Pierre Clémenti, Klaus Kinski, Alida Valli
PLOT: A singer spends a night trying to escape from her overbearing manager while pursued by one admirer who insists he heard her sing in a city she’s never been to, and another who claims he lost his voice when he heard she’d given up singing.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Have you ever thought to yourself, if only someone would make a Last Year at Marienbad/The Magic Flute mash-up, written according to the non-narrative principles of Eden and After? They could have Catherine Jourdan in the lead as the “A” character, and Klaus Kinski as “M”. . . and why not set it in a grimy, late ’70s Paris overrun with rabid animals? Okay, you probably haven’t; but someone did, and that someone was Alain Fleischer. A director largely unknown in the English-speaking/Region A world, Fleischer moved in the same artistic circles as Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet. While he was clearly influenced by the same ideas as the better known Alains, Fleischer’s work is perhaps too weird to have been rescued from obscurity; all the more reason to give him some consideration.
COMMENTS: There are so many WTF elements in Zoo zéro I can’t possibly cover them all, but between the ventriloquist chauffeur who only speaks through his socialist revolutionary Donald Duck dummy, to a brothel where clients simply listen to prostitutes describing their actions from unlit rooms, practically every scene features someone, or something, inexplicable.
The opening credits sequence recall those of Eden and After‘s. The actors announce themselves by name, then begin reading texts featuring animals, including the biblical story of Noah and the Ark, and the French fairy tale about Reynaud the fox. Each actor keeps reading as another joins the chorus, until, by the end, the overlapping voices form an unintelligible cacophony. A fitting introduction to the experience of watching Zoo zéro: a movie so jam-packed with references and metaphors, its actual meaning becomes almost impossible to interpret.
Zoo begins at the Noah’s Ark nightclub on a rainy night. Eva (Jourdan), dressed like Liza Minelli in Cabaret, performs before an audience all wearing animal masks. A mysterious man later appears in Eva’s dressing room, saying she once knew him as Ivo (pronounced “Eevo”; all the characters have names beginning with vowel sounds and a majority begin with a long “e”.)
Ivo claims to have heard her performance in Salzburg, in The Magic Flute. Even though Eva says she’s never even been to Salzburg, Ivo has a recording to prove it. Uwe, Eva’s manager, takes possession of the tape and refuses to let her hear it.
The dialogue, while not as obscure as in Marienbad, never resolves the confusion. Eva always bluntly asserts the contrary when someone speaks an untruth to her, but she never manages to change their opinions. She flees from every confrontation, running through an empty, moonlit Paris to scream into the night. Uwe keeps trying to convince her that fame and fortune await if she’ll only let him book gigs for her across Europe. When this doesn’t work, he tells Eva if she leaves him she’ll only end up in another cage. Meanwhile, periodic news bulletins report on the rabies epidemic killing off both people and animals.
Fleischer utilizes a lot of obvious metaphors in the comparisons between humans and animals (which are never favorable to any species). One of the performers at Noah’s Ark likens them to the taxidermied décor, and even refers to child prodigy, Mozart, as a trained animal. Eva sings of a tiger who kills a circus performer out of “perverse love.” Rabies is the great leveler here, but Fleischer also implicates politicians, the entertainment industry, and the de-humanizing effects of technology in this state of affairs.
The score features Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” though it makes for an awkward fit with the overwhelmingly dark visual style and nihilistic tone. The art direction could have been inspired by Picasso’s Blue period. Zoo isn’t without touches of black humor. When Eva runs away from him a second time, Uwe promises the ventriloquist a TV-spot if he can prevent her from getting lost in the zoo. Just outside the zoo’s walls, Eva comes across identical twin foley artists (Yvan and Yvon), working out of an unmarked white van. It turns out they’re responsible for the ambient jungle soundtrack pervading the city.
Yavé (Kinski), the zoo director, has been waiting for Eva there, where a computerized sound system allows him to communicate through a heavily distorted electronic voice. More mystifying back and forth occurs, about how Yavé lost his voice when Eva abandoned her singing career, even though Eva insists she still sings. They speak to each other through the cage bars wherein lions menacingly paw at the walls and pace back and forth.
You may sympathize with the characters’ impatience; at about one hundred minutes in length, Zoo zéro often feels longer. While there’s a lot of intriguing and beautiful footage of Jourdan running around in Parisian ruins, the poor quality of the available prints hampers the effect. Which is a shame, since it seems like the imagery was designed with a great deal of artistic intent—even if those intentions can be difficult to discern, for a number of reasons.
Like The Magic Flute, Zoo ends with night vanquished. At Eva’s instigation, Yavé unlocks the zoo’s cages, freeing the captive animals from human control, but this doesn’t exactly bring about harmony between the “wild” and “civilized” aspects of the world. A rosy dawn turns the predominantly blue color scheme to a glowing pink but scenes of monkeys and lions roaming around flaming wreckage suggests the post-flood world is still a fallen Eden.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by ConfessYourself Podcast, who called it ” a must… stunning and I really have no idea what is going on.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
Buy Zoo Zero / Top Line DVD on Amazon
Wow, never heard of it, but sounds really intriguing.
I say yes to this. Klaus Kinski’s scene in the tiger room is my favorite.