I saw Rat Film at 10:30PM on Friday night, after a long day of festival going. Considering the circumstances, I went in a bit worried that I would have trouble giving my full attention to the film. It quickly became apparent that this worry was needless. Rat Film, the feature length debut of director Theo Anthony, grabs you with its boldness from the get go, and never lets up. It’s a dazzling, virtuosic film, one with big issues on its mind, but enough aesthetic savvy to work through them in indirect ways.
To my slight disappointment, the film does not feature any scenes of go pros strapped to rats, wandering the streets of Baltimore. Instead, Anthony’s film alternates between historical considerations of the rodent problems of his home town, slice-of-life portraits of contemporary Baltimore residents as they battle the never ceasing menace of the rates, and strange, elliptical asides, including a blocky computer game simulation of Baltimore’s streets, and images of infant rats being consumed by snakes. All this is set to an infectious soundtrack, by turns crunchily industrial and ethereal. There’s also narration, voiced by Maureen Ross, in a tone eerily detached from the action on screen.
As this summary suggests, Rat Film has no shortage of style. At times it shoves this style in the audience’s face, with quirks like footage being randomly paused and restarted, seemingly without explanation. The mode here is deliberate obfuscation – the film works to resist easy readings of its core concerns. This excess of style never feels pretentious, though, in part because it feels genuinely idiosyncratic and coherent. Even when the inner logic of the film does not readily present itself, you always get the feeling that it has been worked out meticulously by a probing, original mind.
To what extent does Rat Film’s deliberate disjunction build into a bigger picture? That’s a little hard to say. The archival work that Anthony highlights slowly but convincingly builds the case that Baltimore’s African-American population has not only been historically marginalized, but treated in many ways like the rats that run the streets. This hardly seems controversial, though, given Baltimore’s iconic status as a microcosm of systemic injustice in U.S. cities.
In that sense these historical sections, though they shed new light on some horrific details, make up the least interesting part of the film. Better are the simple, funny, humane portraits of people dedicated to making life more rodent-free in the present. Best of all are the frequent moments when Anthony abandons these more naturalistic portions for surreal dreamscapes of the imagination. More than anything else, these asides meld the personal and the social, and make Rat Film seem like a movie by a major new talent.
