Le rat

From the dark corners of an apartment, a rat observes the life of an old man. When the weather is nice, the old man sets out to complete his life work. To do that he has to follow a woman and take her home. He does this for love and for his mother. Today it is nice weather, but the old man doesn’t know that the past will soon catch up with him… Beautifully shot in black & white, without a single dialogue, Le rat provides a nightmare-like impression of an old man who tries to reconstruct his mother from the bodies of other women. The makers of the film, Christophe Ali and Nicolas Bonilauri, met each other in the ‘Jean Vigo’ Cinema in Gennevilliers and decided to start making films themselves. The idea for this film came after reading Memories of a Rat by Andrei Zanievsky. That novel is about the life of a rat, from the birth – ‘when I opened my eyes, there was only darkness’ – until its death, when the animal finally sees light. The film is a kind of negative version of the novel, according to the makers. For their cinematographic influences, they mention David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Elem Klimov’s Requiem for a Massacre. The result is of a stunning, alienating and almost sad gruesomeness.