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The penny drops. The scales fall from the eyes. The curtain is pulled back. In any deception, there comes that moment when the delusion must be abandoned and the consequences of prevarication must finally be faced. Today we visit a pair of short films that live in that pivotal moment, and we find that exposing one truth can sometime bring another even darker truth to the surface.
The couple in Igor Kovalyov’s “Hen, His Wife” has a secret, although neither partner seems to know it. They seem quite settled and content: the wife runs about the house, cooking and cleaning, tending to their pet giant human-headed tardigrade, and generally seeing to all her blue-faced husband’s needs while he sits slumped in an easy chair. Not a well-balanced relationship, to be sure, but everyone seems quite happy. So it’s quite a spanner in the works when a traveling salesman drops by and, in the course of making his pitch to the sedentary man, feels compelled to whisper the awful truth: the wife is actually an enormous chicken. And wouldn’t you know, it’s kind of obvious when you actually stop and look at her. Evidently, the husband never has, and he suffers a complete meltdown, throwing her out and plunging into an emotional doom spiral. Why, the whole thing is enough to make him forget about the ladybugs crawling all over his face.
Kovalyov’s figures are uniformly grotesque, with misshapen features, huge folds of undulating skin, and unnatural colors. (It turns out to have been perfect training for his later role as co-director of The Rugrats Movie.) In that context, a 6-foot tall hen doesn’t seem such a bad thing to be, and she certainly isn’t the weirdest thing in the apartment. There’s a bitter humor in the way the husband views this whole situation as a terrible betrayal, even though there seems to have been no attempt whatsoever at concealment. That this of all things would be the breaking point is an intriguing conundrum.
It’s reasonable to view “Hen, His Wife” as an unsubtle metaphor for bigotry, as the husband’s outsized reaction would feel just as harsh if she had been outed as Jewish or an escaped criminal or a fan of Nickelback. Indeed, the salesman doesn’t so much leave as vanish in a puff of smoke, like a pernicious rumor. That might be too much to put on the shoulders of this slight, one-joke cartoon. That said, the wife’s return to see the fate of her beloved husband is authentically sad, and reminds us that love might conquer all, but only if we let it.
The truth in “Pâté” is obvious to anyone who cares to see it: the world is destroyed. That much is clear to children Otto and Vera ((Ty Arnold and Samantha Browne-Walters), who are dispatched into the wasteland wearing adult-sized environmental suits to harvest cockroaches as the only available food source. Unfortunately for them, their deeply damaged mother (Jane Culley) is living in a fantastical past where she remains the belle of the ball in costumes borrowed from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet production. Her selfishness is such that she will do anything to win the favor of the only man left alive. She’ll genuflect, she’ll dance, and if there aren’t any cockroaches left to serve for dinner, something else—or someone else—will have to do.
“Pâté” is an accomplished student film, with excellent production values and a well-earned sense of dread. (The short earned attention at Sundance, proving to be the calling card that earned director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo her sole feature credit, the psychological horror film After.Life.) It doesn’t really rise above its premise, though. For a film set in a future apocalyptic wasteland, there’s surprisingly little satire in “Pâté.” It’s about the dark twist that is foreshadowed early on, but even if you don’t discern where the story will be going (as the quietly grim Otto surely does), you’ll be waiting for that shoe to drop. The vibe is that of a particularly baroque episode of “Tales From the Crypt.” Still, it’s hard to deny that a story about adults reveling in their ill-gotten luxuries while handing the consequences of their sins to their children retains its cultural relevance. You just have to take that walk yourself.
Like the stubborn bigotry of the hen’s husband, the Mother’s selfish complicity in the ongoing cruelty of the world is troubling to behold. The state of denial will always be a suitable subject for drama, because a truth delayed is never a truth dispatched. It will always be waiting to surface, to pay back the damage with interest.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(“Hen, His Wife” was nominated for review by Jenn; “Paté” was nominated for review by Eric Smith. Suggest a weird movie or two of your own here.)
