Sundance Presents: "Zoo" --- Not that there's anything wrong with that!

Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival is oozing with beauty and elegance.

One film that has opened minds is Zoo. It's about what director Robinson Devor calls the "last taboo."

I don't know about that. I don't think we've bottomed out yet when it comes to taboos.

Anyway, Kenneth Turan of The Los Angeles Times is one critic to fall under the spell of Devor's bestiality movie. He calls it poetic.

PARK CITY, Utah -- Zoo" is a documentary about what director Robinson Devor accurately characterizes as "the last taboo, on the boundary of something comprehensible." But remarkably, an elegant, eerily lyrical film has resulted.

"Zoo," premiering before a rapt audience Saturday night at Sundance, manages to be a poetic film about a forbidden subject, a perfect marriage between a cool and contemplative director (the little-seen "Police Beat") and potentially incendiary subject matter: sex between men and animals. Not graphic in the least, this strange and strangely beautiful film combines audio interviews (two of the three men involved did not want to appear on camera) with elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations. The director himself puts it best: "I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it."

Devor and his writing partner, Charles Mudede, live in Seattle and were stunned, as were many in the state, by a story that broke in 2005 about a local man who died after having sex with an Arabian stallion. Though bestiality is not illegal in Washington, the subsequent revelation of the existence of an Internet-based zoophile community (the men refer to themselves as "zoos," hence the title) was a shock.

Though there was the inevitable tabloid fuss, what Devor called "the prurient spectacle," the filmmaker was also "shocked that nobody did an in-depth look at this, that there was no investigative reporting rounding the story out with the psychology involved. I thought, 'This is an opportunity.' "

Though "Zoo" is intent on allowing these men to be heard, Devor's intention was not polemical. "I'm not in there wrestling with the legal or animal cruelty issues," he said. Rather, he envisioned a film like his others: "I count on the natural world pulling my films through. I thought the marriage of this completely strange mind-set and the beauty of the natural world could be something interesting."

In introducing "Zoo" at Sundance, Devor called it "a difficult film and a difficult film to make."

He added: "A lot of people looked at me as if I was an exploitative person, dredging up something for profit, and that bothered me. I was certainly asked many times, often with a wrinkled brow, 'Why are you making this film?' It was something I did resent; I thought artists had the opportunity to explore anything."

..."It happens," the filmmaker said, "so it's part of who we are."

I think Devor is half right.

It's part of who SOME of us are. It may be part of the glitterati milling around at Sundance, but it's not part of who I am.

So this is art -- sex with a horse.

Turan was so taken with Zoo that he agrees Devor "aestheticized the sleaze right out of it."

Now really.

Is that possible?

Is it possible to make a "beautiful" film about bestiality?

How can something so morally perverted be poetic?

I'm not surprised that Devor made his documentary/horse sex movie.

As an "artist," he has the right to express himself. I strongly believe in his right to create "Zoo."

However, expression isn't a one-way street. Others have the right to comment on the depravity of his expression and viewers finding the depiction of horse sex as beautiful.

Of course, I haven't seen "Zoo." I don't rub elbows with the sophisticated artistic elite.

I'm in no position to review the film. But I can say that bestiality isn't elegant or eerily lyrical.

It's abusive and deviant.

Oh, and dangerous. Having sex with a horse can get you killed.

Remove the sleaze?

Impossible.

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Read the 2005 story that moved Devor to poetically document the tale of a man and the sexual allure of a horse.