ZOO: "Mammal to Mammal" Love At Cannes

"Neigh...Couldn't we just cuddle?"

The film that took the Sundance Film Festival by storm is making its mark at Cannes.

Zoo, by filmmaker Robinson Devor, is a tale of "mammal to mammal" love. The bestiality movie, while shocking the Cannes sophisticates, still is getting praised.

Yes, the "semi-documentary" about American men having sex with horses is a crowd pleaser.

"They've crafted a subdued, mysterious and intensely beautiful film that presents bestiality not for the purpose of titillation, but as a way of investigating the subjective nature of morality," the movie trade magazine Variety wrote.

"Subdued, mysterious and intensely beautiful"?

I don't see how it could be "intensely beautiful."

Where's the beauty in men having sex with horses or men talking about having sex with horses?

It's perverted, not pretty.

And when are the animal rights people going to protest the sexual exploitation of horses?

The men heard in the film are remarkably honest about their motivations. One of them argues "mammal to mammal" love should not be seen as wrong.

Another firmly rejects the tag "bad person" his employer lays upon him before he is sacked. They all say the horses were willing participants.

Indeed, the only judgement seemingly expressed in the documentary is not on the matter in the stable at all. It is in fleeting radio references to US President George W Bush's "war on terror" and the presumed complicity-for-profit of big companies such as Boeing.

UNBELIEVABLE!

President Bush even gets dissed in a bestiality movie!

Even the cast ended up feeling compassion for the men depicted in Zoo.

John Paulsen, who played Pinyan, said he believed the engineer had been on a self-destructive streak linked to his defence work, a divorce and injuries from a motorcycle accident.

"Here's a man whose greatest loves in his life were so secret, so private," and who abruptly had "these great secrets in his life made so public by dying in such a public and humiliating way," he said.

But Paulsen himself acknowledged the black humour surrounding the incident, and now the film, saying that "in a way, it's a classic Western, except here it's the horse riding the man."

Well. That's special, isn't it?

They sure don't make Westerns like they used to, Pilgrim.