(UK, 75 min.)
Written and directed by Phil Mulloy
“It’s got to mean something. Why else would it have
screened?” asks a character in Phil Mulloy’s animated feature The Pain and the Pity. The same question
is bound to befuddle OIAF-goers who tackle the film. The Pain and the Pity is difficult to handle, but it is not without
its rewards since one can gain some sense that the film means something even if
that “something” is always hard to grasp. It’s a fun film to ponder and debate.
The Pain and the Pity
signals its ambitious artfulness in is opening scene, which starts the film
with the end credits and some whispering voiceover before the cast of
characters in the film—both The Pain and
the Pity and the film-within-the-film—babbles over a snafu with the
credits. The film, the cast members allege, cites the actors' names
incorrectly.
The characters of The
Pin and the Pity might be familiar to some viewers since they played the
Christies in two previous films, The
Christies (2006) and Goodbye Mr. Christie (2012). Viewers who
haven't seen the other two Christie films
(including this reviewer) might feel as if they are missing out on part of the
joke. The ambiguity is part of the film’s appeal, though, as the characters,
who are little more than indistinguishable silhouettes with monotonous robotic
voices, become trapped in a secret room and held at the mercy of a murderous
spider and his henchman, the fly.
A strange whodunit ensues as the Christies plot their escape,
all the while blaming their director—some Phil Mulloy character—for their
current predicament. Their only options are to play Russian roulette with a
magic button on the wall labelled “do not touch”—naturally, they touch it—or to
pick each other off one by one at the behest of mean Mister Spider, who says he
will let the winner go free.
The Pain and the Pity
holds one’s attention and imagination surprisingly well for a film with little discernible
point and a one-note visual style. The blobs of inky black Christies are
occasionally interrupted by odd cutaways to an interview with another inky
blob, a Japanese man in search of his girlfriend, who recounts the story of his
love affair atop an animated bird’s eye view of Soho. The interview scenes
enjoy the busiest composition as Mulloy fills the screen with small strokes of
gulls. One can’t really tell at first whether it’s snowing where the Japanese
man speaks or whether one is watching high volumes of traffic flit about the
area. It’s only when the film inserts a few archival stills and adds more birds
that one can start to make sense of the story and try to place its relevance to
the paranoid crew in the room.
The Pain and the Pity
is an engaging mental game of situating oneself in a place and a setting. It’s
a task of getting a feel for an atmosphere and for a situation in which
tensions are high and nobody can really be trusted. It requires a flight of the
imagination and some mental painting of the film’s simplistic avant-garde canvas. It’s experimental black
comedy at its highfalutin best.
The Pain and the Pity
is an odd and dense puzzle that never really makes sense whilst the mystery
unfolds, but it provides a fun and challenging task of detective work at what
the Christies’ original dilemma, which never really finds resolution, has to do
with the claustrophobic killing spree in the first place. It’s got to mean something,
though. Why else would it have screened?
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Pain and the Pity
screens:
Saturday, Sept. 21 at the ByTowne Cinema at 7:00 pm.
Please visit www.animationfestival.ca for more
information.
