Métamorphoses

No review needed. If you watch this movie and you find it enjoyable, stop, leave what you are doing, and seek a psychiatrist with urgency! you are literally minutes away from a mental breakdown and your life and others are truly in danger.

At this point in my reviews I usually provide an objective summary of the initial plot, before launching into my view of the movie. That is impossible with this movie as there is no discernible plot.

Apparently the movie is about gods walking on earth and frolicking / toying with humans. That much is consistent with what I saw, but that provides the background to the plot, at best. Beyond that, there's nothing.

Quite random and nonsensical. One scene doesn't seem to follow from another. If each scene is a mini-story, they're pretty boring, pointless, inconclusive stories. Which would sum up the entire movie - boring, pointless and inconclusive.

Metamorphosis has a lot of nice earthy action in nature. Greenery is the same to any era, as is sex and human interaction between people young enough to deserve their carnal behavior. The stories of Ovid lend a legitimacy. But Honore adds a very homey French familiarity with the human body and it's activities missing from modern synthetic US cinema. I don't know if the film is really that good or I liked it so much because it has been too many years since my last roll in the hay.

This movie is an adaptation of the poem written by the Roman poet Ovid. It has gorgeous cinematography and beautiful acting. I like the modern depiction of the gods in the Roman pantheon and their interactions with humans.

Seen by your reviewer at the 2014 London Film Festival, 'Métamorphoses' transplants Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' to modern-day, working-class France (for those unfamiliar with Ovid - I'm not sure I'd ever heard of him - he was a poet from ancient Rome). A group of Roman deities wander the countryside meddling in human affairs - meddling that generally involves nudity and livestock.

I can't make up my mind whether or not I like this film; I will say it was engrossing. Despite the 'flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks' structure, writer/director Christophe Honoré manages to keep the storyline, such as it is, flowing neatly and the viewer does not get confused about where he is in the narrative.

Little of the nudity is particularly attractive; unfortunately Honoré has gone for people with natural, rather than film star (or indeed classical god-like), bodies! But my main concern is the treatment of the many animals in the film: a cow simply standing tethered in a field is one thing, but in the scene where a lion and lioness are trapped in a room and the lioness begins to attack the lion, one wonders whether that was spontaneous action or was she trained to do it - and if so, was anyone concerned for the animals' welfare?