Foxes, an intriguing Irish set drama from Slovakian director Mira Fornay might look like yet another multiracial Ireland flick, but its strained familial melodrama, it’s gorgeously East European aesthetic and it’s mysterious movements immediately alert the viewer to its qualities as a piece of art.
The film concerns the volatile relations between two Slovakian sisters. Alzbeta (Réka Derzsi), a young au pair, arrives in Ireland with the seeming intention of securing a man and setting up a new life in Dublin. Tina (Rita Banczi) is already established in the city. She is engaged to an Irish citizen and is accumulating a collection of diverse friends. Following one or two noisy fallings out, Alzbeta teams up with a grungy girl named Ducky and gets drawn into dusty corners of the city’s counter-culture. Various men, including one glamorous bloke with a sports car, pass her way as she makes a disorganised effort to forge a life. Neither girl has any way back, as their home in Slovakia is set to be demolished to make way for a motorway.
Presented in wilfully chromatic scales and disjointed scenes, Foxes is never easy viewing. Diehard fans of Mike Leigh’s Naked may thrill to Ms. Derzsi’s brave venture into unabashed horridness but it’s awfully hard to take for an hour-and-a-half. The characters around her are little better and make for angry, bleak company.
One gets the sense we’re not supposed to like or enjoy them. One gets the sense we’re supposed to think Foxes is brilliant but we’re also supposed to squirm in discomfort and disgust for its duration. Mission accomplished.