Writers: Zsofi Kemeny and Rozalia Szeleczki
Director: Rozalia Szeleczki
Appearing at this year’s Raindance Film Festival, the Hungarian film Cat Call can certainly position itself as one of the festival’s more unusual offerings.
The basic premise – a 30-year-old girl, having trouble pinning down her romantic relationships, falls head over heels for her colleague’s cat, Smoothie – is bizarre enough to grab our initial interest. But the film, sitting tonally between comedy and horror, avoids easy categorisation (no pun intended), and instead has something more substantial than just shock value.
Fani (played with comic verve by Franciska Torocsik) works as an architect, but her personal life is all out of balance. Every time she meets a prospective boyfriend, her imagination flashes her forward to his gory, blood-spattered death. Any romantic vibes are quickly extinguished. Her life takes a turn when a new architect arrives at her firm, Mihaly (a classically handsome Csaba Polgar). They compete for the same renovation contract; but there’s definitely something else between them. So far, so conventional. Visiting his apartment Fani meets Milhaly’s cat, Smoothie (voiced by Marton Patkos). The cat begins to speak, and Fani is the only one who can hear him. Smoothie also exhibits a surprising talent for rapping. Fani is instantly drawn to the charismatic, musical creature, who in a great scene, woos her with the story of his kittenhood and days on the streets, to the strains of Debussy’s Clair De Lune.
The surreal notes of this film play off against Fani’s encroaching memories of her deceased father. As her relationship with Smoothie becomes ever more improbable, fragments of childhood memories start to come back. Initially, she reveres his memory; a famous rock star, tragically killed in a motorbike accident. But as her life comes off the rails – even her self-involved influencer friend Zsanett (Adel Csobot) expresses concern for her sanity – Fani’s mind is able to piece together the reality of a frequently-absent, narcissistic father, who is at the heart of her inability to commit to any (human) relationship.
Cat Call’s comedy is applied with broad strokes, but Franciska Torocsik’s perfectly-pitched performance is nuanced and keeps us invested, while the screenplay, by Zsofi Kemeny and director Rozalia Szeleczki, dives head-first into its unbridled silliness. Fani seeks advice from Zsanett, who is so dedicated to her Instagram numbers, she doesn’t notice that her husband has left her, and the scene where Fani brings Smoothie home to meet her family; the dialogue zings with double entendre. The comedy begins to flag as we realise the human-cat relationship has played itself out well before the final third of the film. Cat Call is at its daring best in the first hour, then the narrative loses momentum. It is the problem with portraying such an outlandish concept: after you’ve done a cat starring in a gangsta rap video, there’s nowhere left to go.
While Cat Call may steer too closely to the American rom-com formula it adopts to be truly subversive, there’s enough whimsy and quirk to make this film a cut above the average romance.
Cat Call is screening at the Raindance Film Festival runs from 19 – 28 June in London cinemas.
