Tuesday, 10 November 2009

Human Nature

Michel Gondry, 2001

From the writer/director partnership of Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry, whose follow-up was the incomparable Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, comes this tale of human pretence, artifice, neurosis and the way we value what we idealise at the cost of what we actually have. As Nathan Bronfman advises Puff, a man raised as an ape as he struggles to become civilised, 'remember, when in doubt, don't ever do what you really want to do'.

And at the end, as Puff marches proudly back to the forest, he nods to two cows in a field by the road. It's not just a passing touch but a clear symbolic comment that civilisation has turned us all into domestic cattle. Moo.

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