A spin on The Metamorphosis, Feathers tells the story of a family struggling to cope in the absence of a male head of household.
A grim and gritty drama with a long streak of magical realism, the film’s main character is a silent and dutiful wife and mother, who tries to provide for her three children after an unfortunate turn of fate. The film opens with her unspeaking obedience while the father controls the money, gives her his orders for meals and housekeeping, and holds forth loudly and confidently while chatting shit. The man’s a clown, but she gives him no reproach and their little world inside this drab flat is entirely at his mercy.
To impress his boss, he throws a showy birthday party for one of his kids, getting balloons, a cake and a magic show. The magician does old-timey tricks like pulling out a string of scarves, and turning his wand into a bunch of flowers. He invites the dad to climb into his box, hey presto! the box is empty forby a chicken. Now turn the box around again, and hey presto! Em. Uh. Huh.
The permanent transformation of the patriarch into a chicken manages to simultaneously be hilarious and devastating. It’s a comical event but played completely straight. And as the days and weeks pass by, the mother must find a way to bring money in, keep her family afloat.
They live onsite at a factory, and owe money to the company store for appliances, rent, everything they own. They have to keep working to keep the roof over their heads. But the factory doesn’t hire women, so there is a continual shuffle of tenuous and temporary solutions. The mother spends the whole film juggling and you as the audience are just waiting for it all to fall.
I found it a little overlong, given the dreary subject, but otherwise excellently put together. Moments of comedy stand out against the otherwise bleak landscape of the story, and with very little spoken dialogue, both the characters, the tale and the themes are made crystal clear. This is a dark fable, criticising the default dominance of men in both public and private life.