Human Nature (2002)
Director: Michel Gondry
Fine Line FeaturesThis week's Forgotten Flick is venturing all the way back to 2002, golly-gosh… it seemed all so primitive back then; no Facebook/i-Phones/Wikipedia etc. On the subject of "primitiveness" let me help steer you in an interesting direction if you happen to find yourself standing in your local video store with a slightly bemused "What the hell should I rent", look on your face.
At the moment, most new releases on the shelves are utter junk, so stride on up to the person behind the counter and ask if they have a copy of
Human Nature in the store. If you happened to enjoy the delightful madness of
Being John Malkovich, then check out the man who wrote that film's second big screen feature.
Writer Charlie Kaufman teams up with creative French genius Michel Gondry to explore a fascinating scenario that involves a human who grew up in the forests as a monkey and is then discovered by a scientist and his girlfriend.
Tim Robbins plays Nathan, an anal-retentive neat freak scientist who sets out to change the wild man named Puff (Rhys Ifans) who is a chronic masturbator into a super-refined bourgeoisie muppet with enough table manners and polite conversation to make Prince Charles come across like an inbred Chav from Dagenham.
What Nathan doesn’t realise is that his girlfriend Lila (Patricia Arquette, the woman with the most perfectly imperfect teeth in the world!), suffers from a biological disorder that makes her look like Chewbacca’s sister in the ‘body-hair’ department. Lila has to get electrolysis to combat her shagginess but soon realises that Puff is in danger of losing his ‘wildness’ and she is forced to choose between a life of modern convenience or going into the woods to live in harmony with nature and Puff.
Bizarre love triangles, murder, police and purgatory are present throughout the film, as well as Nathan’s ridiculously hot French lab assistant (played by Australian Miranda Otto). Do things get complicated you ask? Damn right they do, and to great effect.
Full of incite into the perverse desires of the human heart and the bizarre workings of the so called civilised mind,
Human Nature is a hilarious look at what may lurk deep inside us all; primitive urges and desires outside the rigid constraints societal standards.
- Review by Jordan Bloomer
Here's the film's trailer: