(courtesy IMP Awards)
It’s a rare thing indeed to emerge from watching a movie of any kind and feel both soothed and euphoric.
Surely the two states are antithetical, with the more active one bludgeoning the other into emotional oblivion with boundlessly energetic vivacity? Or the former chilling you the f**k out to such an enervated extent that the high of being giddy with boundless joy seems less preferable to soaking up all the peaceful vibes.
But somehow, Flow (Straume), a dialogue-free animated marvel bestrides these two two states with immersively enrapturing ease, the just-under 1.5 hour joy of a film by Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis who co-wrote the story with Matīss Kaža, delivering a narrative that is both calm-filled and nuanced, and edge-of-your-seat involving.
The most-viewed film in Latvian history which smashed box office in much the same way as the floods which dominate the landscape of the film rush through forests and through the towering stone of now vacant human cities, Flow knows the value of letting a story find its groove and do its thing without either slowing things down to a near-stop or racing so fast that you get whiplash from the narrative punctuation points.
Set in a forested landscape where people seem to have disappeared suddenly, leaving behind unmade beds and artwork half-done on desks, the pen resting next to paper as if the artist might resume at any point, the movie focuses on one wholly naturalistic cat whom we first meet staring into its reflection in a slowly moving stream ripe with fish that sustains, rather tellingly, a feral pack of dogs along with our adorable dark gray feline.
The sounds of the natural world aside, the forest is hauntingly silent, with the cat moving from the trees and stream of the natural world, which have been filled with small and giant wooden statues of cats – it’s clear from the design who the subject muse was, making a poignant point that here is a loved cat now shorn of its human companions – to a home that, a shattered window aside, through which the cat moves seamlessly to a place it knows well, looks like it’s still lived in.
But there’s no one around, and Flow doesn’t try to explain where they have gone; it’s content to simply show a world now empty of humanity where animals, domestic and wild, thought the lines are now blurring to a pack of dogs who, a lone Labrador aside, make life difficult for our protagonist cat, and to let the rhythm of this world follow its own uncomplicated route.
It’s a quiet and uneventful start that is absolutely entrancing from the word go.
Even as the floods roar through the forest, preceded by a herd of panicked deer in full galloping escape mode, and the cat, dog and a host of other animals including a object-gathering ring-tailed lemur and a sage capybara who seems untroubled by just about everything, find sanctuary on a random wooden sailing boat, Flow never really amps up or tamps down the pace, letting even the most narrative exclamatory of moments unfold with a quiet but emotionally intense beauty.
It feels like not much is happening at all as the animals, who behave naturally and sound just as you’d expect them to, do their best to survive a flood that seems to keep building and building, subsuming forest and abandoned stone buildings with an unstoppable if stately force.
But pay attention, and really you cannot look away from a film that feels like a video game meets a piece of classic artwork sprung to life – the animation style of the animals looks a little cruder in one sense that the backgrounds but really it allows for the naturalism of the animals to step to the fore where they power the narrative with purposeful ease – and you will see a great deal of storyline playing out.
The film’s protagonist feline often acts as you might expect a cat to do, either hissing, initially at least, at its new, unexpected life companions, who become the loveliest of found families in ways that surprise and delight (helped along by a sizeable dose of magical realism which is used effectively but sparingly) or chasing reflective dots of rare sunshine or knocking one of the lemur’s prized possessions of a ledge just because (do cats ever need to explain themselves?)
But while it’s very much a cat, it’s also an animal in need of companionship and even as it is swept off the boat repeatedly, save at one point by an ancient looking, multi-finned whale who seems to have sprung from the fossil record into a modern water-filled world, it finds itself again and again either being saved or saving others, its greatest saviour a Secretarybird who is itself an outcast of its flock.
Flow is a film that celebrates connection and family in trying and challenging times, evoking the idea again and and again that we can survive alone maybe but likely not, and that we need others to really make our way in a world that in this movie at least, and let’s face it, our current world too, is trying in all kinds of ways to wipe us off the face of the earth.
This animated gem delivers its messaging much as it delivers its visual gorgeousness – with a calm and unhurried style and with a love of immersively rich and colourful moments which sees at various points the cat suspended in the water chasing a rainbow of skittish yet beautifully coordinated fish for a meal or the animals staring at a field of twinkling stars.
Flow is happy to let us linger in these visually lush, emotionally full and narratively unhurried but event-rich moments, and to proceed at the pace of the boat which, one storm aside, proceeds at a leisurely pace, takes us from a point of vulnerability to one of connection and fullness but in nuanced, thoughtfully meditative ways that might take their time to unspool but which, as they do so, reveal a world of meaning, a landscape of emotions and a reassuring sense that the world, even at its worst, is a beautiful landscape, made all the more welcoming if we have close and selfless companions with which to share it.