Berlin Film Review: ‘L’Animale’

With the buzzing of tires across the gravelly bottom of a small quarry bitten into a hillside, Austrian sophomore director Katharina Mueckstein (“Talea”) kickstarts her coming-of-age story in promisingly high gear.

And when one of the helmeted motocross riders, clad in light, Imperial Stormtrooper-style body armor, is revealed, against expectations, to be a girl, there are shades of the opening of Celine Sciamma’s “Girlhood,” in which a team of young women pummel each other through the exaggeratedly masculine silhouettes of their football uniforms.Sciamma’s previous film “Tomboy” also looms large in comparison, and later, in the most formally experimental moment of “L’Animale,” Mueckstein pays homage to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” when her characters suddenly break into song.

Her references are impeccable, but they’re also the problem.

Despite strong performances that go a long way to embedding the film in real, idiosyncratic life — and the warm-toned,

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