SFIFF: Traveling With Pets

If you like spare and lyrical films where a woman finds her voice, Traveling With Pets at the SFIFF is the Russian movie for you! If you like those types of films even more when they have atmospheric music and almost no dialogue, you, like the voting panel of the Moscow International Film Festival, will want to give this movie the Grand Prize!

Wellllll, we can't really say that we're the type of movie watcher that races out to see movies described as "haunting" in the writeups (we usually prefer the ones described as "quirky," but we thought we should expand our horizon this time around), so we must admit we were a little puzzled by Traveling with Pets, in the same way we're kind of puzzled by short stories in the New Yorker where they don't use quotation marks but indicate all dialogue with dashes instead (such as: --It's cold out. --Winter's coming. --What about the livestock., etc.)

That's not to say the movie isn't oddly compelling in its unsentimentality -- a woman who lives in a field in Russia chases a balloon either shaped like a heart, Mickey Mouse, or a uterus; her husband drops dead; she adopts a goat and a dog; she hooks up with a guy she meets hitchhiking; and then things start happening -- and the cinematography is really quite lovely. We're still probably the kind of movie viewer that prefers to see the films described as "talky," but if you like it "dreamlike" and/or you love foreign film but hate reading subtitles, you can't go wrong with Traveling with Pets!