How do you make a road movie set in several European countries for just £1million? Set it inside your lead character’s head and use strikingly inventive visual imagery to conjure a world full of the weird and wonderful, that’s how. And if the previous sentence rings a bell for The Mighty Boosh fans, it’s because Paul King, the BBC television comedy’s director, wrote and directed Bunny and the Bull, his first feature. He shot the film entirely in studios in London and Nottingham, and he tells the story with the kind of richly detailed, dreamlike shots that Boosh fans will instantly recognise.
Stephen (Edward Hogg) is an agoraphobe who hasn't left his flat in a year and his possessions are all neatly contained in labelled boxes. But when his supply of the same freeze-dried meals he eats every day at the the same time runs out he has to think about returning to the world. In his panic, he begins to reminisce about the road trip he took with his friend Bunny (Simon Farnaby), which resulted in his illness.
As we see in flashback, Bunny and Stephen are totally mismatched. When they set out on their jape, Stephen wants to visit quirky museums (including the Belgian Playing Card Museum, the Netherlands Leather and Shoe Museum and the German Museum of Cutlery, all of which really exist) but all Bunny wants to do is gamble and chat up girls. Although he is supposed to be Stephen’s best friend, in reality Bunny is a bully and a fool, and before long he lands them in daring and dangerous escapades.
The film rather meanders at first but when they meet Spanish waitress Eloisa (Verónica Echegui), working in a dreadful Polish restaurant, it moves up a gear. Predictably, Stephen falls for Eloisa but feels unable to tell her and, even more predictably, Bunny gets to have sex with her. The three of them then set out for Spain, where Bunny declares that he wants to fight a bull. Along the way, they meet The Mighty Boosh’s two stars, Julian Barrett and Noel Fielding, both outrageously overacting as a dog-obsessed Hungarian tramp and Eloisa’s self-obsessed bullfighter brother respectively.
The story is told in a bold and highly stylised fashion, using semi-animated backdrops, back projections and beautifully detailed miniature sets that often have a weird, dreamlike quality and remind us that this is all going on in Stephen’s head. And although Bunny and the Bull is a visual treat, it’s let down by a script short on laughs, and the phrase that comes to mind is style over content.
Yet there is much to admire, including the denouement, where Bunny fights the bull. It’s strangely affecting and King evokes Stephen’s mental fragility with a gentle touch.
Bunny and the Bull is on nationwide release in the UK from 27 November.
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