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There’s a striking commonality between Billie Piper’s last role, in Sky’s dark comedy-drama I Hate Suzie, and her directorial debut Rare Beasts. It’s as if she’s transformed herself into the figurehead for a certain kind of flawed womanhood – appearing with her kohl-painted eyes wet and half-melted, her lips drawn into a painful grimace. These characters remind us of what a drain the modern world is on women, all while demanding that the single socially acceptable form of feminist remains the overachieving “girl boss”. To fail is to disempower one’s self.Rare Beasts 2021 Movie Download.
It’s an idea explored in a lot of recent British comedy, with Michaela Coel and Phoebe Waller-Bridge still revelling in all that is messy and intimate. But Piper’s creation has a particularly frantic and self-consciously confrontational quality – Mandy (Piper) is a working mother at the end of her tether, desperate for respite and finding little to comfort her. The director, writer and star has harnessed the feeling of intense rootlessness in a film that pops and fizzes with existential frustration. Its only weakness is how fully trapped it becomes in Mandy’s mind. It’s a barrage of thoughts and emotions, looking in vain for some sense of clarity.There’s many an extreme close-up in Rare Beasts. At times, it feels as if the entire screen might be swallowed up by Piper’s face and the drooping lines of Mandy’s wearied expressions. Reality is not fixed. At one point, we’re shown a young Mandy on a gilded stage, tap-dancing away as the audience, her extended family, continue to scream and argue.Rare Beasts 2021 Movie Download.
But other figures here tend to drift in and out of view with relatively little consequence, both underexplored and underutilised – there’s her son Larch (Toby Woolf), who’s implied to be on the autism spectrum; her parents, Vic (David Thewlis) and Marion (Kerry Fox), who are separated but still catastrophically tethered to each other.Rare Beasts 2021 Movie Download.