Film

Zoo in Budapest (1933)

Director: Rowland V Lee

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A strange, ecstatically beautiful little fantasy, set almost entirely within a quaint Douanier Rousseau zoo, all trailing palm fronds and swirling mists, where three innocents - a pair of lovers and a runaway child - seek refuge one night from the cruelties of the world outside. At first a hostile jungle, the zoo mysteriously mutates by night into a Garden of Eden, a transformation subtly painted in light by Lee Garmes' incredible camerawork, which draws delicate analogies in captivity between humans and animals, and culminates with the fantastic sequence of the revolt of the caged beasts, which points the way to freedom. Only marginally let down by the final scene - a brief coda showing the couple happily settled into their own little cottage 'just like anybody else' - the whole film reverberates like one of Blake's 'Songs of Innocence'.

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