Nous Sommes Donkey
The
film starts off with an image of a human baby obviously in the womb with a
donkey head. It’s
eyes are close and it looks like how all foetuses look only with a donkey
head. The pretentious bilingual title
comes across the screen and we cut to a stylized cowboy scene in which there is a
cowboy with a donkeyhead (played by Vincent Cassel)
sitting in a saloon drinking. The bar
man (who has a human body and a badger head) keeps telling him he’s the only
one who can clean up this town but the donkeycowboy
insists he’s just passing through, finishes his brew and starts heading out the
door when he hears the cocking of a shotgun.
We see that the barkeep has a shotgun aimed at him and he says he won’t
let him leave, but the donkeycowboy quickdraws his pistol spins around and shoots the shotgun
so that it flies out of the barkeep’s hands to which the barkeep responds “I
knew it was you.” The donkeycowboy retorts “Not
anymore.” and slumps out of the bar.
Then we cut to a modern day
bedroom in a luxurious penthouse apartment and the same donkeyman
who we just saw as the cowboy wakes up as if from a dream to the sound of his
alarm clock. We find out his name is Akrou. He rises and
looks over at Nystra, the beautiful naked woman lying
next to him (played by Marion Cotillard with the head
of a bunnyrabbit).
He takes a shower and looks burdened.
When he comes out Nystra is now awake and
filing her nails over the edge of the bed.
He opens up a small gift box containing a necklace and she tells him
it’s beautiful and he gets dressed in a nice suit and goes down to his car park
in the basement. Just as the elevator
hits the level of the parking garage he gets a flash of the donkeyhead
baby in the womb and then shakes his head to rid himself of the image and gets
into his posh Ferrari and drives to a tall office tower. The city is shot in Christopher Nolan style
so that all the skyscrapers look really oppressive.
He
gets to the office tower and slumps through the lobby and takes the lift down
to the basement where he goes into a changeroom and
changes out of his nice suit and into a coverall greasemonkey
suit. He heads down a long concrete hall
to a room guarded by two big men with horse heads. The horsemen tease Akrou
asking him:
“So, that sexy lady know
where all the money comes from yet? Or
are you still putting on a suit and pretending to be a businessman when you
leave home in the morning?”
Akrou grunts “Just
gimme the hammer already and let me do my job.”
They
hand him a sledgehammer and open a giant steel door to a small concrete room
which he enters and they quickly slam the door behind him. There’s a large hole in the floor out of
which a giant eel keeps trying to crawl out and Akrou
beats the eel with the hammer until it retreats. The horsemen security
guards occasionally peaking through a thick glass slot in the steel door and
laughing like idiots.
The
next scene is another dream of Akrou as a knight who
is begging the local magistrate not to burn a lady for witchcraft as he knows
she’s innocent, but the magistrate blows him off and threatens him not to speak
up against the Crown’s decisions again unless he wants to suffer a similar
fate. We get a fairly long visual
sequence of the woman who is Nystra being led to the
stake in shackles through an angry mob.
Akrou
snaps out of it and notices his shift is over. The horsemen unlock the steel door and let him
out. He hands them back the sledgehammer
and they hand him a briefcase full of money.
One
horseman teases him “Good pay for a day’s
worth, Mr. Businessman.”
Akrou
replies “Go fuck yourself.” He takes the briefcase and changes back into
his business suit.
We
get another advancement in the cowboy dream where Akrou is being pleaded with by the barman to clean up the
town and that he’s the
only one who can do it. One bandit sees
them talking and comes over to bully them and Akrou quickdraws and kills him.
Then
we cut back to present day where Akrou is awoken from
napping in his car by the two asshole horsemen banging on his window with their
flashlight and laughing. They tease him “If
I had a bitch like yours at home I wouldn’t waste my time dreaming in a parking
garage! Dumbass! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Akrou scowls and
drives home. When he gets there he has
brief hallucination that the doorman’s head is the eel he is paid to hammer,
but then when he glances back he sees it is just the friendly badgerhead doorman.
We get another
extended dreamy sequence, this time with Akrou as a
gladiator in ancient Rome. He defeats an
opponent and then participates in a typical Roman celebration full of drunken
debauchery. He keeps getting drunker and
drowsier and just as he’s falling asleep he overhears his handler plotting to
rig his next gladiatorial match against him and he then passes out in the dream
but snaps back awake in the elevator as it makes a loud ping noise to announce
that he has reached his floor.
The story progresses,
always alternating between his real modern life and the three fantasies of
cowboy, knight, and gladiator. Conflict builds within the three
fantasies. As a cowboy pressure builds
as outlaws destroy the town and he must decide whether or not to sober up and
take a stand. As a gladiator he learns
more and more that his next match will likely be his last because the men who
organize the spectacle want a new star of the coliseum. As a knight he faces the conflict of going
against the other knights to save an innocent woman from being burned at the
stake.
In real life Akrou faces no conflicts, he is paid well for a simple but
bizarre job of keeping a giant eel monster from entering an office building and
enjoys a luxurious lifestyle living in a nice condo and fucking a sexy lady. Yet in real life he appears to be growing the
most restless. The security guys at his
office continue to taunt him and he grows more and more snappy with them and
takes out his anger by beating the eel monster more furiously. He returns home in a snit and is cranky with Nystra who wants to tell him something but because he is so
cranky she clearly decides to wait.
He goes for a
long night drive and drives very fast and recklessly and the shots of him
driving are intercut with shots of the foetal donkeybaby
and the sound of a heartbeat gradually rising until it is the only sound that
can be heard and the road noises have gone mute.
We then get
some more plot advancement in all three fantasy stories.
He arrives at work and the security horsemen tell him
his shift doesn’t start for several hours.
He snaps and then and they try to restrain him but he moves very quickly
and beats them to the ground unconscious.
He enters the room and waits as the eel monster comes out and he kneels
before it and asks it what it is. The
eel monster replies that he is Akrou’s feelings. The eel monster tells him that Akrou is rewarded with material comfort to repress his
feelings and keep him in this dreamworld. Akrou asks in
puzzlement how this can be the dreamworld. The eel asks Akrou
where he feels most like himself and Akrou answers
that he feels most like himself in his dreams.
The eel tells Akrou “Then for you, those dreams are what is
real. This world is the fantasy. This world is where you pretend.”
We cut to the
resolutions of all three dream plotlines.
In the cowboy world he gains innerstrength and
shoots all the outlaws and becomes sheriff and is then betrayed and murdered by
the barman who was just using him to defeat the bandits so that he could seize
power. In the gladiator plotline he
enters the coliseum and discovers he is made to fight a huge number of animals
such as panthers and lions. He smiles
and charges at the huge balcony where all the men who arranged his death are
watching and Akrou smashes the legs of the balcony so
that they all tumble into the arena with him and they all get eaten by lions
together. His betrayers are screaming in
agony, but Akrou just grins as lions tear him apart
because he has the satisfaction of taking the betrayers with him. In the medieval plotline he fights through
the mob and frees Nystra from being burned at the
stake and they make a daring escape leaving the city behind them.
We cut back to
the real modern world and show the giant swelling eel monster is destroying the
skyscraper from within. Nystra goes out onto Akrou’s balcony
where she has a perfect view of the office building crashing down. We cut to inside the office tower as the
building crashes down on Akrou crushing and killing
him. Nystra
looks pained as she sees the giant eel monster let out a loud cry and then
slither back down into the pile of rubble and vanish.
We cut to the
medieval dream plotline for a nice warm shot of Akrou
as the knight riding off as a fugitive with Maiden Nystra
affectionately holding onto him and then we cut back to the real world where
the real Nystra looks out at the rubble and put her
hands on her belly and the camera moves in on her belly and we hear the
heartbeat sound and end with a shot of the foetal donkeybaby
in her womb. Then the song ‘Monster Love’
by Goldfrapp plays over the credits.
If you liked this, declare me a genius and
then check out these other related writings:
Here’s my big budget trainwreck attempt.
It’s kinda
swords ‘n sandals meets fantasy versus reality.
Flipping the
bird at crime.
Ridley Scott’s masterpiece is unicornier
than ever!