Maîtresse
Linda Ibbari has captured a special relationship: that which four women have and maintain with their pets. In front of her knowing lens, they anthropomorphise their animals, talk to them as if to a friend, a child, a person. But sometimes, there arises the confusion of a combined animality.
A face, eyes half-closed, nods, lulled by the purring that pervades the sound space. In the following shot, a mastiff, closely cropped, pants beneath the languid caresses of its mistress (Maîtresse). An animal-body extends a human-body through a match cut, which makes them mutate as per the laws of the most common zoanthropy. Domestic. In the wake of Ulrich Seidl (Tierische Liebe, 1995), Linda Ibbari filmed Jenny, Luna, Elisabeta and Chantal, who have a very particular and exclusive affection for Tutule (a sphynx cat), Junkie (a Rottweiler), Monsieur Dupond (a macaw) and a magnificent coral python whose owner silently contemplates every single movement of its coils. In front of the filmmaker's lens, the mistresses play unrestrainedly with their objects of love, talking to them as if to a person, while the spirited editing accurately constructs a space of inter-species libertinism, more comic than tragic; a zone of confusion in which the language articulated can suddenly become gasps and cries, where humanity returns to the wild in remembrance of its animal condition.
Emmanuel Chicon
