In the Flesh: Be My Cat: A Film for Anne

In Be My Cat: A Film for Anne, Romanian writer/actor/director Adrian Țofei casts himself as a delusional and sociopathic director of the same name attempting to entice Anne Hathaway into working with him by shooting a kind of test film as a proof of concept. The found footage thriller kicks off with Tofei puttering around his house where he lives with his mother and explaining his loose and nebulous ideas for his project with Hathaway, inspired by his love of cats and his apparently life-changing experience seeing her (Hathaway’s) performance in The Dark Knight. There’s a harmlessly unhinged enthusiasm to the process which rapidly disintegrates when Adrian makes contact with his first co-star, actress Sonia Teodoriu, whom he has hired from the internet to play an Anne Hathaway stand-in with whom his “character” is obsessed. Immediately it becomes apparent that Adrian is not only hopelessly naive concerning his creative skills but rapidly losing contact with reality. He makes impossible demands of Sonia, instructing her to evade him without running and berating her when she fails to propose a solution, deploying words like “unrealistic” and “creativity” in

It’s the pitiful, hapless stupidity of Adrian’s grand design that sells the movie where something more cohesive might have resulted merely in bland but serviceable grindhouse violence. He can’t hold a full idea in his head at once, so his constant rambling attempts at explanation invariably fold back in upon themselves. He stammers adjectives about himself and his work without connecting them to anything in particular, makes confused assertions about his power as a writer and director without ever competently framing a shot or even producing a script, and seems unable to conceive of the difference between fiction and reality. His compulsive self-satisfied laughter is more obnoxious than menacing, his propensity for shooting himself from a low angle giving him a pinheaded appearance which ties into his skillful use of various subtle markers of cognitive impairment woven through the performance. People are dying, and they’re dying for a dim-witted agoraphobe’s unwritten script for an actress who’s never going to see it.

But it’s not until Alexandra (Alexandra Stroe), Adrian’s third and final leading lady, finds herself alone with the crazed director that the film breaks through the wall of Adrian’s mania and into something richer. Where her preceding co-stars panicked, Alexandra manages to gather herself and set about the difficult task of sweet-talking Adrian, convincing him to give up on his project and instead go straight to Anne to profess his love. Watching the actress tease out the director’s psychological weak points through perilous trial and error is almost unbearably tense, heightening the film’s relentless unpleasantness into something sharp enough to kill. Its final image is a sort of Texas Chainsaw Massacre tableau in reverse, the hysterically laughing girl speeding into the night exchanged for a woman shutting herself into a closet with a huge fake smile plastered across her face, a claustrophobic retreat into delusion as a tenuous means of escape from that delusion’s source.