Director: Alexis Caro
Writer: Alexis Caro
Cast: Reta, Romain Bellec, David Beaulieu
Running time: 14mins
I wince when I hear Nocturne Op.9 No.2 in a film. That’s nothing against Chopin. It is a beautiful piece of music – but in the cinematic world at least, it has been bled dry; both as a straight musical signifier of cultural elegance, and as an ‘ironic’ contrast against crass or puerile imagery. So, when it turns up in an IFL submission, it feels like an unwelcome fax from the future – a filmmaker who is a little too pleased with themselves telegraphing me the fact there will be a punchline in a few minutes’ time.
Rats begins with cinematographer Charles-Hubert Morin’s camera performing a slow sweep of a prison cell, while Nocturne plays in the background. Morin, who you may remember from The Gravediggers, has a visual style every bit as intricate and eloquent as Chopin’s famous piano solo – something which writer-director Alexis Caro (also of The Gravediggers) deploys to make the coming action seem even more profane by contrast.
Amid all the artistic suggestions of cultural finery, we find Abel (played by hip-hop artist Reta), vigorously masturbating in his bunkbed. It’s the kind of vulgarity which I have to admit I would have laughed at, were it not for Chopin telegraphing ahead to make sure I was expecting it – and the fact it lands so early in the sequence. It would work better if the order saw the camera pan over the peaceful Zahid (MMA fighter Mehdi Baghdad), listening to music and reading, and Eddy (David Beaulieu) who is being ‘rocked’ as he sleeps by the commotion in the bed above him – before finally shattering the calm by showing the two of them desperately trying to ignore Abel.
Strange as it might seem for me to fixate on this opening scene, I think it’s emblematic of what transpires over the course of the film as a whole. The film seems to be set-up for a tense, single-scene drama, but quickly gets carried away with itself, and rushes the delivery of what could have been a serviceable plot.
Abel is jerked from his jerking by the sound of a distant explosion. Eddy stirs from his slumber in the bed below as shouts and screams begin to echo through the cell-bloc, and goes to see if he can make out what is going on, through the room’s small window. But Zahid doesn’t look up from his book – even as it becomes clear a riot is unfolding, and a number of their fellow inmates are using it as an opportunity to escape.
When Abel begins putting his well-exercised right-arm to practical use, slamming on the cell door to get the attention of the rioters in the smokie corridor beyond, one approaches him with an ultimatum. The old man, Eddy, is allegedly an informant. The man promises to open the door, on the condition Eddy is silenced to a permanent end.
This feels like a clever way to set up an inexpensive yet impactful piece of independent filmmaking, then. We’ve been primed for an enclosed story, in which there are layered stakes that the characters will peel back, as the tension mounts. The impulsive Abel is desperate to break free at the first opportunity – and is inclined to do anything that may help him scratch the itch he has clearly developed in jail – whereas Zahid clearly feels a futile escape bid inevitably adding to his sentence is not worth the trouble. At the same time, as the two characters battle each other over which course of action to take, they may end up changing places – either after it transpires whether or not Eddy is indeed a rat, and what he may or may not have divulged, or as the smoke from an approaching fire steadily floods the cell.
Unfortunately, Caro’s script does not live up to this potential. No sooner than the tensions manifest, they are hastily put to bed with a not-especially engaging fight scene. While the scene is beautifully lit and shot – red emergency lights and billowing orange smoke enveloping the action, allowing Morin’s cinematography to shine once again – there is so little effort to play with any of the stakes verbally first, and so little effort to make the most of Baghdad’s fighting experience, that the whole affair feels weirdly improvised; like an amateur theatre troop trying to end an ad-lib skit where they’ve acted themselves into a corner.
Rats has bags of potential. The production had a talented cinematographer at its disposal. It had a capable cast, which could have used a unique and intriguing set of backgrounds to inform its central conflict. But it does not seem to have the patience to use any of those rich resources to its advantage – and that’s a real shame.