Moll is not a particularly prolific director. I saw two of his early films, Lemming and Harry He’s Here to Help, about twenty years ago. Since then he has only made four films, two of which I have seen. The early work had an engaging approach to narrative, mixing up Hitchkockian tension with a surreal twist, which was right up my street. One suspects the starry Monk (2011) was not a great success, which might explain the subsequent slowdown. However, he has kept on going, and in the same week that my co-writer went to see his last film, (The Night of the Twelfth) I caught his penultimate, Seules Les Bêtes. This is a portfolio film, telling elements of the same story from five different points of view, with the tales overlapping and the timeline jumping around. Mostly set in the rural France, it also manages to include a sequence set in the Ivory Coast, marking it out as a film that tackles the smallness of our big world, where chance encounters are ever more likely and capable of disrupting the apparent tranquility of even an isolated community. The very final twist is perhaps a leap too far, but the film on the whole succeeds in managing its disparate elements with real aplomb. The characterisation is straightforward but effective. It’s a film that is driven by (human) all too human instincts of its varied cast, their motives fuelled by desire for love, money or lust, and in this sense its intentions to represent the things we have in common the world over is beautifully realised. Moll remains one of the finest directors around, and it’s great to see that his career would appear to be picking up pace after the mid-term blues.
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