Gallery Carre
Into the Shadowy World of Sex With Animals (NYT)
Apr 25th, 2025 by Viviane
By MANOHLA DARGIS
The director Robinson Devor apparently would like viewers who watch his heavily reconstructed documentary, “Zoo,” to see it as a story of ineluctable desire and human dignity. Shot on Super 16-millimeter film, with many scenes steeped in a blue that would have made Yves Klein envious, “Zoo” is, to a large extent, about the rhetorical uses of beauty and metaphor and of certain filmmaking techniques like slow-motion photography. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who died from a perforated colon after he arranged to have sex with a stallion.
Mercifully, you don’t see this death on camera, though if you sit close enough to the screen, you will see a few fairly brief images of one sexual event, accompanied by graphic sounds. It isn’t pretty, which is why the images appear only on a small television monitor. Art-house devotees may be a tolerant lot, but it’s doubtful they want to look at a stallion’s erect penis stretched across the big screen like a sailboat boom, at least in public. Certainly such an image would work directly counter to the self-conscious poeticism of Mr. Devor’s film, to its carefully confected narrative of misunderstood barnyard love and baleful testimonial. It is, after all, difficult to sing of the bodies electric and equine amid a chorus of “yucks.”
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