Written & Directed by: Emma Perret
Grade: B
Emma Perret introduced her short film, in struggling English, as being about "the essentials: food...and men...and a pig," at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 8, 2007, and I couldn't say it better myself. No Part of the Pig is Wasted (Tout est Bon dans le Cochon) is about six isolated and poor men working construction in what looks to be the middle of nowhere. Tired of eating the same thing everyday—"fish, fish, always fish," one complains of their putrid-looking fish stew—they dream, like the POWs of Rescue Dawn, of the meals their wives or mothers used to make, which incidentally always included a bed of pork lard.
One day, one of the workers has the idea of pooling their cash together to purchase an inexpensive piglet, whom they can then raise to thick, meaty adulthood, thus turning their fantastical memories into a reality. But who knew how cute piglets are? (Certainly not I, though it should be noted that adult pigs are, well, not so cute.) The same man who suggested they buy the swine soon finds himself taking a shine to it, and must then regularly come up with excuses to stay its execution, ranging from "it's not fat enough" to "it won't taste right just yet".
The moral of this quick sweet and comic fable is obviously that carnivorism is far more difficult to practice when a face is put to the porkchops. That is, pig + personality = a creature as cute as a puppy, particularly evident in a near-final shot of the pig with his head stuck out a car window. An end of film trip to a sausage factory drives the point home, as watching blood fetishistically poured through a funnel proves remarkably unappetizing.
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