Hundreds of Beavers

Sometimes you may watch a film that is a work of art. A deep sea of metaphor and symbolism. A replication of the human experience. Kino. And Hundreds of Beavers is such a film.

It is the story of Jean Kayak, an applejack maker who likes far too much of his own product. Everything is rosy until beavers cause the destruction of his orchard. Winter sets in, and driven by hunger, Jean takes on the life of a trapper to survive the wilderness. His ultimate goal, the pelts of hundreds of beavers to secure his marriage to the daughter of the merchant.

The film is a callback to the slapstick silent era and cartoons to absurd extremes. Jean sets traps that push the limits of Rube Goldberg machines, with various forest critters caught by means that border on the ridiculous. The same mechanisms see Jean get in and out of equal amounts of trouble. Once a joke reaches the rule of three, it becomes a mechanic of the forest. A wolf whistle, always calls a woodpecker, the merchant’s spit of chewing tobacco always misses the spittoon, and that skunk really wants that frog for reasons I don’t want to understand. Also the beavers need a forest of wood for a massive dam and secret project. Both Jean and the beavers become each other’s antithesis, one where there can be no synthesis, just annihilation of one or the other.

The film isn’t entirely silent, but extremely spare in any recognisable dialog, relying on muttering and actions to convey any dialog between characters. Jean’s journey evokes that of any contemporary survival game. Jean engine builds his progress by trading his catch of fish for a (comically tiny) knife, crafting rope and traps out of his clothes, trading the knife for snow shoes and then bartering his way forward for more traps. And the trader almost always has the theme that sounds deceptively like the Wii Shop Channel theme. That is one of the few references throughout this film (the final song is a little bit of a deep cut). There is a good mix of location shoots and digital backlot, all of it is stitched together in a cartoonish economy, which is for the film’s benefit. And there’s plenty of happy accidents abound.

With each scene the stakes, and absurdity, increases reaching a peak I didn’t expect. It is an insanely original film, made on a tiny budget, and is likely the funniest thing outside of Airplane or Hot Fuzz, and a better film about a trapper than Revenant.

I managed to catch this on Shudder. But I’ll probably pick up the bluray of it soon.