There’s been something sinister afoot in provincial France in recent years. Inbred eccentrics and bumbling detectives have populated the seaside villages of Bruno Dumont’s absurdist comedies. Seedy psychosexual drama has leached into the soil of Alain Guiraudie’s farmlands and forest towns, causing poisonous little love triangles to bloom like the wild mushrooms of his “Misericordia.” And now first-time feature director Sarah Arnold takes a run at this new tradition with the careening energy of a herd of squealing boars, to deliver the hog-wild and wonderful “Too Many Beasts,” in which a standoff between hunters and farmers leads to increasingly loopy shenanigans in a small French town called, in all seriousness, Sérieux. “Jean de Florette” it ain’t.
This Cannes Directors’ Fortnight prizewinner sets out its pitch-black-comic stall early with a prologue in which, after a brief contretemps, local man Raoul Brun (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) blows his supercilious neighbor’s head off with a shotgun and then disappears. It’s the bloody culmination of a long-simmering conflict between the farmers of this remote northern countryside village, and the local landowning bigwigs, represented by the patently self-interested mayor (Thierry Godard), who is cultivating the area’s wild pig population in order to lure his wealthy friends out to lucrative boar hunts. But the porcine population has ballooned and now everyone’s up to their eyes in rampaging, marauding boars. The creatures are running amok, destroying crops and threatening the farmers’ already tenuous livelihoods.
