Summary
Lily is an adolescent girl on the run through the French countryside torn apart by a mysterious war. When she finds a strange unicorn and weird family living in a cottage with animals for friends, she attempts to insert herself into and understand their lives.
Review
I like a good trippy film so when I heard that the director of “My Dinner With Andre,” made a film reminiscent of Alice In Wonderland, I was pretty excited to give it a shot.
As the movie opened I was pretty sure that I was going to love this film. We begin in the midst of a mysterious war between men and women. A teenage girl named Lily is driving along disguised as a young man when she is revealed to be a woman by some soldiers from whom she flees on foot.
This opening and the following flight were my favorite parts of this film. The camera work is great and the people she runs across and situations she encounters are truly unique. For example, she encounters a unicorn but it is more like a fat unicorn made from a donkey rather than a horse.
By and by, she comes across a house and this is where the movie ground to a halt. The home is occupied by two siblings, a brother and sister, as well as their invalid mother who never leaves her bed. There are also a host of small animals who sort of speak although the audience is never treated to knowledge of what they are saying.
I felt like I understood much of what the director was going for by creating mystery through odd circumstances and characters a la Alice in Wonderland. The problem is that there is no through line tying the film together and it seems to abruptly end for no real reason.
Imagine watching a version of Alice in Wonderland that takes place entirely at the able of the Mad Hatter and March Hare. On top of that, no one ever talks about the rest of Wonderland and anytime Alice asked a question, she was met with zero response.
That is what this movie is like. She is consistently frustrated by the lack of information anyone gives her. This would be fine if they were slyly slipping away from explanations with their witty banter or if they were so high minded that she simply could not understand them. Unfortunately, most of the communication she attempts to establish is met with straight up stone walling.
It ended up making the film a pretty boring and uninteresting watch. I wish the film had maintained the momentum it began with. It would have been a four star movie but with the crash of lethargy the film reaches at about 25 minutes in I can’t really give it better than two stars. I just didn’t like it.
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