I’ve written (at length, possibly exhausting length) about the problems I have with most found-footage films. Long story short, it’s a style of filmmaking that aspires to mimic reality, so when it works it really works, because there’s something viscerally upsetting about watching terrible things happen without the comfort of the distance that conventional moviemaking affords. But a lot of the time, the filmmakers don’t go far enough to make what they’re doing realistic, instead falling back on the usual filmmaking toolkit or lazy workarounds. And those take me out of it immediately. Nothing sucks me in like making it easy to forget I’m watching a movie, and nothing loses me faster than reminding me that no, I’m just watching a movie.
Be My Cat (subtitled A Film For Anne) does a pretty nice job of playing to the strengths of the style, and the result is mounting dread, a story of obsession and the blurring of performance and reality.
The film opens with a title card indicating that the footage was assembled from 25 hours’ worth of raw footage found at the “Be My Cat” crime scene. Understated, straight to the point. The little detail about there being 25 hours of raw footage is never elaborated upon, it just sort of hangs there, an unsettling little detail. I like that. It immediately cuts to Adrian. He’s a filmmaker in Romania, and he appears to be recording a pitch, directed at actual real-life actress Anne Hathaway. He wants to make a film with Anne.
A film about a Romanian filmmaker who is obsessed with an American actress.
We know from the title card that this isn’t going to end well, but it isn’t immediately apparent how. At first Adrian just seems kind of goofy and awkward, the kind of person whose dreams so far outstrip the possibilities available to them that you sort of want to laugh at him, but that doesn’t last very long. He engages in constant, almost insistent monologuing, punctuated by the nervous, reflexive giggle of an adolescent boy seeing porn for the first time. It’s easy to imagine getting stuck talking to him at a party and being unable to extricate yourself as he prattles on and on with no interest in letting you get a word in. And the more he talks, the more the cracks start to show. We learn that he was bullied in childhood to the point of agoraphobia, and that he developed a fixation on Anne Hathaway as Catwoman in
The Dark Knight Rises, a fixation that calcifies into seeing both girls and cats as innocent and sweet and cute, not like nasty, aggressive boys and dogs. He still lives with his mother because it’s difficult for him to leave the house for any amount of time, let alone leave town. He’s troubled, seriously troubled, and it isn’t too long before it becomes apparent that his grip on reality is tenuous.
So this isn’t a film with any dramatic twists or anything - you pretty much know what you’re getting right off the bat, it’s just a matter of how long it’s going to take Adrian to crack and how bad the damage is going to be when it does. It works as well as it does because it’s presented as found-footage, and as found-footage goes, the execution is solid. It looks like it really was all shot on the same camera (and might very well have been), the sound isn’t perfect, the editing is choppy and the performances all emerge from improvisation so there’s a real naturalism to it. There’s background noise and passers-by, not everything is always captured neatly in frame, there are plenty of shots of the camera pointed at the sidewalk, forgotten in the midst of an argument. It feels homemade and the locations are all grubby hostels and apartment buildings in Eastern Europe. It is easy to forget, moment to moment, that you’re just watching a movie.
Even when you’re aware that you’re watching a movie, it’ s likely because a large part of this film is examining the blurred line between image and reality. Everyone uses their real names or variations on them, so we’re watching a Romanian filmmaker named Adrian make a film about a Romanian filmmaker named Adrian who is obsessed with an American actress who is himself making a film about a filmmaker who is obsessed with an American actress. And throughout the film, the character of Adrian displays a confusion between fiction and reality fueled, it seems, by the idea that fiction is much more comforting. There’s a line in
The Blair Witch Project about how things don’t seem so bad when you’re looking at it through the viewfinder of a camera, and that’s a big part of the text here. The camera is a distancing tool, and it seems like that’s what Adrian is doing, at least initially. He’s making a film to convince Anne Hathaway to come to Romania to star in a film that he wants to make about a filmmaker who is obsessed with an actress, and he’s definitely working out his obsessions through the filmmaking process, using the fiction that this is a fiction, that it’s all make-believe, in order to put some distance between himself and the violence that results from his obsessions and his tangled, thorny past. It’s clear to the audience from early in that the actresses he hires to play the role of Anne are not in safe hands, beginning with impossible acting demands, moving on to an insistence that things not look fake, which becomes a need for the actresses to be “transformed” when they are not perfect enough. It’s my understanding that part of the progression that serial killers often go through is rehearsal of their fantasies, as a midpoint between fantasizing and acting on those fantasies. They’re working up the courage to do it. And that’s what it feels like we’re watching - we’re watching someone taking the first steps toward acting on their fantasy, and justifying it by telling themselves that it’s not them, it’s a character. Not that it matters to his victims.
In some ways, it’s sort of a less-cartoony
Sorgoi Prakov, and though it doesn’t reach the heights of feral lunacy that film does, I think it’s the better film, because it is more believable. Adrian doesn’t really go full maniac at any point, he’s the same giggly, oddly insistent nobody throughout, evoking pity and irritation and horror in equal measure. It drags a little at the very end, but I think it comes good with an ambiguous ending that denies us anything neat and tidy, leaving us with the feeling that the film didn’t so much end as we were shut out of anything that came next, and that what seemed like a breakthrough for Adrian could be anything but. It’s an intelligent film that works well within the limits that found-footage prescribes.
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