There’s been something sinister afoot in provincial France in recent years. Inbred eccentrics and bumbling detectives have populated the seaside villages of Bruno Dumont’s absurdist comedies. Seedy psychosexual drama has leached into the soil of Alain Guiraudie’s farmlands and forest towns, causing poisonous little love triangles to bloom like the wild mushrooms of his “Misericordia.” And now first-time feature director Sarah Arnold takes a run at this new tradition with the careening energy of a herd of squealing boars, to deliver the hog-wild and wonderful “Too Many Beasts,” in which a standoff between hunters and farmers leads to increasingly loopy shenanigans in a small French town called, in all seriousness, Sérieux. “Jean de Florette” it ain’t.
This Cannes Directors’ Fortnight prizewinner sets out its pitch-black-comic stall early with a prologue in which, after a brief contretemps, local man Raoul Brun (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) blows his supercilious neighbor’s head off with a shotgun and then disappears. It’s the bloody culmination of a long-simmering conflict between the farmers of this remote northern countryside village, and the local landowning bigwigs, represented by the patently self-interested mayor (Thierry Godard), who is cultivating the area’s wild pig population in order to lure his wealthy friends out to lucrative boar hunts. But the porcine population has ballooned and now everyone’s up to their eyes in rampaging, marauding boars. The creatures are running amok, destroying crops and threatening the farmers’ already tenuous livelihoods.
A year later, Brun is himself assumed dead and his equally militant farmer friend Alain (Pascal Rénéric) has taken up his crusade. But a new wave of spookily Brun-reminiscent unrest is plaguing the town. Piles of dead pigs (it doesn’t seem like the “30-50 feral hogs” meme ever made it to this corner of rural France or surely someone would have mentioned it) are being left as gory warnings in the grounds of the mayor’s mansion. The local gendarmerie, led by blandly untrustworthy Inspector Marchal (Bertrand Belin) is called in to investigate.
And so it becomes the first case assigned to new recruit Fulda Orsini (an irreplaceable Alexis Manenti), a depressive heavy drinker who has recently been transferred from Corsica under an almost palpable cloud of disgrace. The Cop with a Troubled Past is a genre staple so lovingly embraced by the screenplay (co-written by Arnold, Jérémie Dubois, Olivier Seror, Romain Winkler and Mehdi Ben Attia) that it is really quite something to see how completely Manenti fills it out, with hilariously stonefaced results. As Krusty the Clown always maintained about the pie-in-the-face gag, it’s only funny when the sap’s got dignity and this sap has almost nothing but a perversely hangdog dignity left to him.
At the same time, a police psychologist going by the absurdly homonymous name of Stéphane Danjir (a terrific Ella Rumpf) has been assigned to the squad. She arrives emanating don’t-fuck-with-me Parisian attitude and is promptly given a broom closet as an office. Some of the rather inept, possibly corrupt police officers take to her therapy sessions. Not so Fulda, who is doubly wary of her due to his newly acquired sexist distrust of all women, following his wife’s recent desertion. “Don’t worry,” says Ms Danjir coolly. “I can be just as incompetent as a man.”
But pretty soon the two interlopers into this small, grudge-holding but tight-knit community — the kind where, going back generations, everybody not only knows but is mightily resentful of everyone else’s business — develop a kind of outsider kinship. Fulda all but ditches his ambitious partner Chaton (Vincent Dedienne), in order to team up with Stéphane to get to the bottom of the endless pig-slaughter, and to put paid to the local superstition that Brun’s ghost may be the culprit. And even if the crime in question does not turn out to be particularly sophisticated, the pair deserve kudos for solving it during a bravura setpiece: galumphing through the forest, sweaty, horny and off their heads on accidentally ingested meth.
Black comedy is among the hardest tones to nail, and if there was a single knowing wink from the actors or even a soupçon of exaggeration in the execution, the whole thing could simply become too tiresomely antic to be actually funny. But Noé Bach’s photography is rich yet unromanced — as attuned to the mordantly lush forest foliage and the snuffling, stampeding animals it conceals, as to the scuffed, workaday surroundings of the police station and the dingy decor of Brun’s deserted farmhouse, with its moldy cups of coffee and dusty taxidermy.
And Florencia Di Concilio’s discordant score also skews Sérieux, keeping proceedings as pacy as a straight-up thriller, even when the observation of corruption, police collusion and the rural class divide — all particularly sore topics in France since the 2018 Yellow Vest protests — starts to cede center stage to the offbeat love story and the increasingly murky murder mystery. Arnold, previously well known on the festival circuit as a shorts director, maintains an iron grip on the escalating mayhem of her hugely entertaining feature debut, and strikes an unwavering balance between a perfect sufficiency of laughs, the ideal quantity of intrigues and, in the end, exactly the right number of beasts.
