Everything in Piaffe is attractive, including the title: a single word with French etymology and an ineffably elegant double ‘f’, the only letter in the alphabet to ascend and descend at the same time. Piaffe is Ann Oren’s first feature after a decade of working as an artist and is named after a diagonal dressage movement (from the French verb meaning “to strut” or “to paw the ground”). Full of equestrian accessories, the film ogles other beautiful things too: interiors lined in deep red velvet, for instance, and the peephole of a proto-cinematic apparatus, which is gilded and made of dark wood. In the opening scene of the film, a botanist uses this obsolete object as a woman watches. We observe him with her, and he in turn sees a stereoscopic world of ferns curling and unfurling in meticulous detail. Already, an array of erotics has been set in motion: invitations to a haptic mode of vision via extreme close-ups of coiled fronds, scopophilia and fetishism aroused by the machine and by the chain of gazes going from woman to botanist to plant. In addition to all of this, there is the sumptuous use of 16mm film, as well as an actress who resembles a young Charlotte Gainsbourg and plays a soignée, submissive woman who would fit perfectly into a Catherine Breillat film. And none of this is to mention that this woman later grows a horse’s tail.
Piaffe continues after the title card with a story about a half-decent Foley artist called Eva who is working on an advertisement for a mood stabiliser featuring a horse and its rider. Eva is struggling to reconstruct the sounds convincingly. In wooden boxes arranged on the floor of her home studio, an assortment of women’s shoes are placed on grass, stones and straw. Not one combination is suitable, it turns out, for reproducing the sounds of a horse’s hooves in a stable. In her boss’s words, Eva is “a shitty replacement” for her predecessor. Maybe she is a shitty replacement, but unlike her predecessor, she exists in an extensive world of her own creative substitutions.
Eva visits a stable to view actual animals, to learn from them up close. Once she stops trying to block out the interfering noise of the outside world, things soon start to affect her – things, as they say, resonate. From here on, Piaffe continues to compulsively find aural and visual rhymes between this woman and her surroundings. While the erotics, fragility and tactility of the film recall a cinéma du corps or a cinema of extremity, Oren – who appropriated an image of Isabelle Huppert’s eye from Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher for her first video installation, ‘An Eye for an Eye’ (2010) – explores contagion through more oblique methods of montage and association. When Eva dances, her girlish limbs evoke coltish ones: comparable images of her legs in white socks and a horse’s legs in white socks are joined across a cut. When she grows a horse’s tail, it is first of all a nub that parallels plant stems seen elsewhere in the film. When the tail is longer, visually it echoes her hair, the tendrils of which in turn may mirror, for the spectator, the leaves of a hanging plant. When Eva drinks from a bottle through a straw and then a horse pisses, it initiates a fluid kind of link between the two.
I find neither botany nor equestrian pursuits particularly entertaining – my house plants keep dying on me and I preferred dolphins as a pre-pubescent source of phallic energy – yet neither a green thumb nor a horse fetish is necessary to get off on Piaffe. Piaffe is very sexy. Light flashing blue and pink in one scene might signal bisexuality at play, but pansexuality better captures how Eva is ceaselessly drawn to colours and horses, to old leather and old technology, and to other non-human, often inanimate things besides. Although she has a romantic interest in the botanist, she isn’t interested in loving him. She is interested in him because he indulges her desire to be tamed and trained, or to be treated as an object.
All of which surely screams Breillat: Piaffe is strongly reminiscent of Romance (1999). But while Romance includes unsimulated scenes of penetrative sex, Eva is penetrated in only one scene, and in an unorthodox, fantastical fashion. The botanist carefully inserts the entire length of a red rose, previously in a white vase the shape of a swan, into her open mouth. Save for a red button on her blazer and red lipstick, Eva is a vision in creamy white – vase-like and swan-like until her horse’s tail is visible again. Whatever pleasure there is here for Eva, there is also pleasure for a spectator who will derive enjoyment from reading for pattern, repetition and resemblance. What is so hot about red in this film is that it is suddenly starts to materialise everywhere, a carnal obsession and a polar opposite to all of the blue Eva wore before.
In a less thrilling part of the plot, her predecessor at work is also her sibling. Zara is played by an actor who starred as the Foley artist similarly tasked with the sounds of horses in Oren’s thirteen-minute film ‘Passage’ (2020). In the third act of Piaffe, Zara returns from their hiatus and their return introduces themes of sibling rivalry and incest to an already rich film. Here, Piaffe suffers a little from an affliction of many contemporary artists: a surfeit of ideas (usually in the form of too much theory, too much on the surface). Yet Piaffe is too much fun not to forgive it – and this surplus is, after all, what drives it. Do I need to see more scarlet – lens flare, rose petal, strawberry – after gazing on it in the superlative form of Eva’s full lips? No, but this is the jouissance of Piaffe: an abundance of metonymies and similarities that come together regardless of need.
Laura Staab is based in London. She is one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers.