The Bull (De Stier) had its world première at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2024
Victor Nauwynck’s short film The Bull (De Stier) opens with a strange juxtaposition of images: dressed in a negligée under her fur coat, middle-aged Marie (Maaike Cafmeyer) is dolling herself up with lipstick and perfume, but as she does so she is sitting on a dirty tractor parked outside in the dark, and using its detached rear-view mirror to assess the effectiveness of her handiwork. The deep breath that she takes before heading off tells us that she is out on the pull, hoping to make a sexual impression. Yet her relationship with her husband Cyriel (Wim Willaert) is frostily sterile at best – a banal, ingrained domestic life of meals shared in silence and tentative touches ignored.
This contrasts with Cyriel’s attachment to the cattle on their farm. For Marie cannot help noticing that, as Cyriel brushes down one of the cows in their giant barn, his language is affectionate, even sexualised: “My girl. Yeah yeah. You like this, yeah?” It is almost as though all the warmth that is missing between the couple is being sublimated into the livestock. Likewise, when Cyriel purchases the bull Jos to impregnate the milking cows, Marie will find herself drawn to this big, roaring, hypermasculine beast who is, as the salesman (Sam Louwyck) says, “horny – he’ll mount anything. He gets it on like no other”, since his “sack” is “filled with seed.” How could Marie, childless, neglected and horny herself, resist? Especially when Cyriel seems to be suffering the same engine trouble as his tractor, and failing in the fulfilment of his conjugal duties, while the palpable resentment that Marie exhibits towards the laying hens suggests her own shift into menopause and baby-bearing redundancy.
The farmyard is a place that reduces life to its basic functionality of feeding and breeding. Here cattle become surrogates for the human characters’ own drives and animal attractions, while mediating the couple’s drifting, dysfunctional relationship. Co-written by Nauwynck with Shir Ariya, this is a European story, not just because of its Belgian setting and Flemish language, but its obvious intertextuality with the myth of Europa. It is also, despite its muddy, rainy setting, a work of real beauty, owing to a combination of DP Tamás Apor Méder’s mannered camerawork (increasingly with distorting, estranging fisheye lenses) and Anastasiya Mykhaylova’s lived-in production design. In this most transgressive of (re)unions, Cyriel and Marie, both lost to unhappy, frustrated longings, are steered by nature towards coming together again and once more making the beast with two backs.
strap: Victor Nauwynck’s short film lets an ageing, drifting, sexually frustrated farming couple be steered by nature
© Anton Bitel
