If
you could choose to live under a European colonial power, it would have been
the United Kingdom, hands down (a well-educated domestic civil service, public
works programs, membership in the British Commonwealth, which even countries
that were not British colonies want to join). Belgium was the polar opposite.
King Leopold II was determined to have his “slice of this magnificent cake” and
exploit the heck out of it too. 19th Century Belgian colonialism
serves as the backdrop for Emma De Swaef & Marc James Roels’ weirdly
surreal forty-four-minute stop-motion animated mini-feature, This Magnificent Cake, which opens this
Friday in Los Angeles.
In
its five loosely interconnected chapters, De Swaef and Roels follow five very
different characters, whose fates are intertwined with the Belgian colonial
experiment, starting with Leo 2, himself. The King is plagued by insomnia, even
though his long cherished imperial ambitions are finally being realized. He is
also quite the philistine, silencing a humiliated clarinet player during what
was supposed to be his command duet with piano accompaniment. Poor, abused
licorice stick.
The
experience is enough to drive the poor musician out to the newly opened colony,
but he still can’t find respect at the luxury hotel for boozy expats. The same
is true for its first pygmy employee, who is forced to stand at attention for
hours at a time, with an ashtray strapped to his head. Things fare badly for
him, as they also do for the porters accompanying Van Molle, an embezzler who
left his family patisserie high and dry. Of course, Van Molle is no worse for
the wear, but he will have his own subsequent drunken misadventures. He really
is a cad, which is why his deserter nephew intends to confront him, in hopes of
restoring the family fortune, if not its honor.
Cake certainly has no
love for Leopold II or colonialism in general, but the more strident critics
might feel like the film’s surreal visuals and left field plot turns rather
soften the blow. De Swaef and Roels unambiguously connect the colonists’
personal corruption and vice with the larger Imperial enterprise, but we also
witness as Van Molle befriends a large, trippy snail.
On
the other hand, it all makes Cake quite
distinctive, in all its felt and fibers. Think of it as a darker version of
Adam Elliot or a fuzzier version of Jan Svankmajer. There is also a smidge of
Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s scatological impulses, especially in De Swaef
& Roels’ Oh Willy…, their
17-minute wordless short from 2012, which screens with Cake during its LA run (along with Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s The Burden, which screened as part of
the 2017 Animation Show of Shows). Initially, it take time to warm to this
sometime cruel tale of a schlubby everyman who visits his dying mother at her
nudist colony (a different kind of colony living), just in the nick of time.
However, the weird third act will redeem its mean-spiritedness for most cult
cinema fans.
