2023 Movie
Dir. Ann Oren · Germany · English, German
A sublime mix of experimental and sensual storytelling that will change the way you look at horses forever
Visual artist Ann Oren’s first foray into feature-length filmmaking is a sensual delight and a gift that keeps on giving. Oren approaches her film with sincere dedication to every single building block: Piaffe looks, sounds, and feels sensational while being a fairly modest production. A true indie film, Piaffe verges on experimentation as a young woman named Eva (Simone Bucio) takes over the job of a foley artist from her sister. Even though she’s under-qualified, she tries her best t0 come up with the sounds for a horse-themed commercial to no avail. However, in the process, she notices a bump on her lower back that grows into a horse’s tail. Piaffe is a tale of metamorphosis, not only of the flesh, but also of the heart, as the themes it explores are also directly related to sexuality, submission, and, of course, love as a manifestation of all those things.
When her sibling Zara suffers a nervous breakdown, the introvert Eva is forced to take on Zara’s job as a Foley artist. She struggles to create sounds for a commercial featuring a horse, and then a horsetail starts growing out of her body. Empowered by her tail, she lures a botanist into an affair, through a game of submission. Piaffe is a visceral journey into control, gender, and artifice.
"Nothing is phoned in here, everything is calibrated to a unique frequency so that even though you can trace the influence of Bette Gordon, Catherine Breillat, and Lucille Hadzhihalillovic, Piaffe is its own playful and majestic beast."
— Sophie Monks Kaufman
"A narrative that maintains a stolid demeanor even as it takes the oddest turns. Where these turns lead is arguably indefinite, but getting to the indefinite destination is certainly not dull."
— Glenn Kenny
After her sister falls ill, Eva steps in for her to foley the sound for a commercial featuring a horse; next thing she knows, her body starts changing too.
If there is a carnal cinema canon, Piaffe would be its latest addition. Not only is the film brave enough to show bodies in flux, a cross-species contamination between human, animal, and flora, but it also captures the flow of energies between them. A tribute to processes, both internal and external, it feels embodied. Shot on Super 16mm, Piaffe has a texture you want to brush against and the mere act of looking here turns into touch. The film offers a truly synaesthetic experience when eroticism comes into play: we see Eva discovering her tail, her ambivalence and fondness growing in parallel. Later, there is a largely silent scene where she meets a man who places a red rose in her mouth with the tenderness reserved for all consensual kink practices – it is truly one of the most arousing, but minimalistic sequences in contemporary European cinema, to say the least.
Horsing around doesn't even begin to cover it.
Savina Petkova, PhD, is a Bulgarian film critic and curator based in London whose work has appeared in Sight and Sound, Variety, Little White Lies, Cineuropa, and MUBI Notebook. She is the Programming Lead for Cambridge Film Festival and a senior editor at Talking Shorts, with a focus on contemporary European cinema.
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