Bunny and the Bull

This film was perhaps unfairly promoted as ‘from the director of The Mighty Boosh’, with Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt having prominent places on posters and in trailers. Paul King did direct all three series of that TV show, but such advertising as this doesn’t give him much chance to stand on his own merits, or carve out a new career. Fielding and Barratt are in this film, but with relatively small parts. It stars Edward Hogg (who reminds me of Jon Richardson) as a man who relives a road-trip around Europe with his friend, from the confines of his flat, which he hasn’t left for a year (why did he relive it? We’re never told). The objects in his flat become the building blocks of his recreation of this journey, for which reason this film is called ‘surreal’. I have a few issues with that label. I don’t think it really qualifies as surreal. The storyline is actually very ordinary, and most of the events quite normal. Some of the characters do odd things, but that hardly makes it surreal. If one were to compare it to actual surrealist art from the 1920s (which understandably is a bit unfair) it would come up well short. That, however, is just a label that other people might have applied to it, not the director. It is a slight, mildly funny drama, with the best moments coming from Fielding and Barratt, such that it gives the impression of being a sketch show. The whole thing, in fact, could easily have been a television drama, with little to lift it into the realm of cinema. There is some mild racism in the depiction of foreign characters, which seems to be forgivable if the general concept is comedy. At the end, which I don’t want to spoil too much, there is an intrusion of reality, and I wonder what is intended by this? The fantastic world we have invested in was just a joke? The intrusion initially affects the viewer with sentimentality, but isn’t this exactly what surrealism intends to avoid? It is as if the director undertook to follow one way of telling the story, and then abandons this in favour of getting an effect. It reminds me, a little, of Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic, yet that film does not go as far into surrealism as this one, and the tension between reality and the world they live in is always present (whether in humour or violence). That said, I did like this film, and would happily and with interest watch it again. The visuals are incredible, has great music, and humour, and despite my reservations is a sensitive, moving film.