The 5th annual Ocean City Film Festival (OCFF) is virtual this year due
to the COVID-19 pandemic. It's all online, running from March 4 to 11.
OCFF 2021 has a collection of short films and features, numbering about
80 titles total. Every night, there will be a feature that will be
broadcast online. Some will be one-time screenings, meaning they can't
be streamed 24/7 like the others. They can only be seen once and at that
specific time or you miss it. This film is a one-time screening. It has to be screened live, so if you're not
there for the live event, you will miss it.
There have been several films with the same title that have been about a circus elephant. This French film, written and directed by Zoé Wittock, has its title refer to an amusement park ride. The ride is a large carousel. It's a carousel though that doesn't just spin in circles. It also has six arms that can lift dozens of people into the air, while doing revolutions. Wittock's story focuses on a young woman who works at the amusement park who develops a literal attraction to this ride. She's not interested in being lifted in the air and spun in circles. She literally has feelings, actual romantic emotions for this machine.
Noémie Merlant (
Portrait of a Lady on Fire) stars as Jeanne Tantois, a young woman experiencing what's known as object sexuality or objectophilia, which is sexual desire for inanimate objects. It could be a type of paraphilia, which is arousal due to atypical things. When that arousal is directed at machines, the condition can be called technosexual. It's also a type of fetishism because at one point Jeanne literally wants to have sexual contact with the machine. She strips naked and grinds against it like an animal in heat.
People who experience this condition of objectophilia also experience a kind of animism, which is the belief that objects, places and creatures possess a living spirit or essence. This film doesn't really suggest that Jeanne is a person who embraces animism on a wider level. It just seems as though she only thinks this one amusement ride is alive or has some kind of soul. However, the film never squares if Jeanne is simply suffering from some mental illness, even though it's clear that she is suffering from one.
Emmanuelle Bercot co-stars as Margarette, the mother to Jeanne. She sees how lonely and how antisocial her daughter is. She encourages Jeanne to hook up with a man, but that doesn't work out. When Margarette learns of Jeanne's objectophilia, she doesn't understand or approve. The film focuses a lot on this conflict between Margarette and Jeanne. It's almost a metaphor to queer sexuality. This film could almost be an entry in queer cinema, as being a technosexual might not be far flung from being homosexual or having nontraditional sexual attractions.
Yet, it might be somewhat offensive to make that comparison because some people have compared homosexuality to things like bestiality or even pedophilia, trying to equate homosexuality to some kind of perversion. The perversion is in particular to abusive sexual behavior or sex with someone or something that can't consent to sex by its nature. Bestiality is when a human has sex with an animal, a creature that can't consent in the legal sense. Pedophilia is when a human adult has sex with a child or an underage person, a person that again can't consent in the legal sense.
Here, Jeanne is essentially having sex with a machine, a thing that can't consent in the legal sense. Even if you believed it was alive or had a spirit, it still can't consent. Therefore, what she's doing is more in line with bestiality than homosexuality, so the queer comparisons might just be highly offensive. This is unless you think Jeanne has a mental illness, which the film never really underscores. A side note is that Jeanne refers to the amusement ride with male pronouns, but how does she know what the gender of the ride is? These are questions that this film has no interest in exploring. Wittock just wants this to be a quirky fairy tale. Yet, the tone of the whole thing has such an air of seriousness and reality that it undermines that fairy tale aspect. It just needed to be more surreal.
Jumbo.
Not Rated but contains full-frontal nudity.
Running Time: 93 minutes.
Wednesday, March 10 at 9 PM.
Access the film only on March 10 here.
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