Mr. Zhao
With Shi Jingming, Zhang Zhihua, Chen Yinan, and Jiang Wenli.
With John Hurt, Christian Bale, Daniel Benzali, James Faulkner, and John O’Toole.
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All the Little Animals, the directorial debut of Jeremy Thomas–the producer of major films by Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, Nagisa Oshima, and Nicolas Roeg, among others–surfaced at Cannes last year, eliciting a mainly favorable review from Variety’s lead reviewer, Todd McCarthy, but apparently not much else. The most its low-energy distributor, Lions Gate, can offer the press is a “preliminary” press kit, which doesn’t even mention that the screenwriter, Eski Thomas, is related to the director. (I happened to find out that they’re married. Jeremy Thomas is also related to two highly commercial English directors of a previous generation: he’s the son of Ralph Thomas, who directed the popular Doctor at Large and its countless spin-offs, and the nephew of Gerald Thomas, who specialized in Carry On comedies.)
Mr. Zhao and All the Little Animals provide direct evidence that there’s no correlation between quality and the extent of advertising and media coverage–and they’re far from the only examples of the sort of thing that routinely escapes the radar of the mainstream media.
It’s characteristic of the film’s method that long sequences follow each other without transitions or narrative hinges of any sort, and the stark juxtapositions heighten a potent contrast between the encounters in each segment. Passing directly from the acrimonious responses and questions of the wife to the initially playful though eventually petulant responses of the mistress is something of a jolt, but the husband’s evasiveness with both women provides continuity as well as comic contrast.
Bobby buries Peter and runs away, hitching rides westward. When one truck driver tries to run over a fox, the horrified Bobby wrestles with him for control of the steering wheel. The truck overturns, and the driver is killed. At the site of the accident Bobby meets the eccentric Mr. Summers (John Hurt), whose life’s work has been to collect and bury animals run over by cars, showing a complete indifference to the drivers and a deep devotion to all living things preyed upon by humans. Bobby eventually persuades Summers to let him assist in this mission, and the two of them settle down to an idyllic life in the forest in a simple cottage, sustained by a substantial amount of money Summers has from an earlier career in a bank–until Summers decides they should travel to London and settle accounts with Bobby’s stepfather.
