Butler's Cinema Scene

Natalia Pavelkova

“ZOOLOGY”  My rating: B- 

91 minutes | No MPAA rating

By turns funny, grotesque and touching, “Zoology” is a modern-day fable about a woman whose life is transformed by, well, an unexpected growth spurt.

Natasha (a terrific Natalya Pavelkova) is a paper pusher at a local zoo in a Russian city so emotionally stifling that everything, from the leaden sea and sky to the graffiti-marred concrete walls, is the same blueish gray.

Natasha is gray, too.  She’s in her fifties but looks much older; her unkempt hair is turning white, and she wears drab, shapeless, colorless clothing.

The other women in the zoo’s administrative offices make fun of her (once a mean girl, apparently, always a mean girl) and play nasty tricks.  The one good thing about Natasha’s job is that it gives her a chance to commune with the animals; on the sly she slips sausages to the big cats and throws bread crumbs to the ducks.

Early on in Ivan I. Tveerdovsky’s film Natasha seeks medical help for lower back pain. It’s only when she’s on the X-ray table that her terrible secret is revealed.

She has grown a tail, a fleshy, hairless thing that hangs down behind her knees.

This appendage has a mind of its own, twitching and throbbing.  In the bath it surfaces through the suds like a submarine’s periscope. (All the “tail” effects appear to be practical, no computer animation. They’re utterly convincing.)

Dmitry Groshev, Natalya Pavelkova

Peter (Dmitry Groshev), the radiologist taking Natasha’s X-rays, treats this alarming aberration as just another case in his seen-it-all practice. His calm professionalism keeps Natasha from panicking.

In fact, the much younger Peter is intrigued, less for medical reasons than for psychosexual ones. Pretty soon he and Natasha are an item, and like the cactus flower she blossoms into a fun-loving, disco-dancing doll with a new dye job and ‘do, a slightly improved fashion sense, and a smidgeon of hope for her once-depressing future.

Only problem is that the old ladies in the neighborhood — including Natasha’s aged Mama (Irina Chipizhenko), who doesn’t know about her daughter’s odd condition — are a fiercely superstitious lot.  Rumors rage about the “devil” who walks the city streets, causing death and destruction simply by maintaining eye contact with her victims.

For its first hour “Zoology” bobs along quite efficiently.  Thanks to Pavlenkova’s central performance, we find ourselves cheering as the pathetic Natasha gets a new lease on life.

Things get a bit out of hand in the final 30 minutes, in which Tvardovsky’s screenplay wanders.  Clearly, “Zoology” is meant as an allegory…but an allegory about what?  Too much fuzzy thinking here.

Still, there’s just enough weirdness and pathos to make the film a candidate for cult oddity status.

| Robert W. Butler