Yazar 
Hen, signed by György Pálfi, continues the “animal protagonist” experiment opened by Robert Bresson‘s Au Hasard Balthazar — this time with a chicken. We follow the hen from birth through a journey that takes her from factory to henhouse, where she overcomes countless obstacles. The central question is shaped around how we treat “the other” in a world that always regards her as a second-class creature. Because in Pálfi‘s eyes, the chicken becomes a representation of many groups whose rights are not protected.
Hen on the Run
Hen opens with a birth scene. We watch a hen laying an egg with all its contractions. The chick that hatches — whose life will be as painful as its birth — briefly experiences freedom before it is mixed in with the other eggs. Because even though its shell has just cracked and it has never seen sunlight, perhaps nowhere in the world is safer than this place. Of course, it doesn’t take long before it leaves this warm nest. As the chick goes through long processes among its farmmates, it first abandons its shell, then is sorted and fed by humans. When it grows up, the day it becomes food is closer than it has ever been.
The main character, distinguished from the other chickens on the farm by her black feathers, is placed in a car by one of the workers to become his dinner — “found below standard” during transport. This is the first time the chicken faces death as a result of arbitrary decisions. As she will do many times afterward, she finds a way to escape and flees the car at a petrol station. Thus begins the chicken’s journey through this cruel world as a wandering vagrant. First a fox, then a terrifyingly fast motorway — the character makes a rapid entrance into a life of being tossed from place to place. Pálfi follows her with his dynamic camera at every moment, always finding a way to capture her brief pauses and her unceasing flurry of activity.
One of the film’s greatest strengths is presenting a main character that feels genetically unmanipulated and non-performative. Choosing a chicken as the main focus in a live-action film is already ambitious enough, and Pálfi manages this challenge with great control. The chicken’s instinctive reactions to events — despite the fictional scenario she inhabits — make her a far more interesting figure to observe than a human would be. The way she constantly turns her head while surveying her surroundings, the clucking we almost think we understand, the way she tries to eat every little scrap she encounters — in every scene we feel we are watching a creature that has not been filtered through cinema. Pálfi, without breaking from the narrative’s linear flow, tries to capture the chicken as naturally as possible — approaching her in every scene with the same great curiosity as the audience.
A Witness to Human Cruelty
Despite all its observational elements, Hen does not function like a documentary. Pálfi positions the chicken as a “witness to human cruelty.” The people the character encounters rarely treat her well — more often they are people who don’t even notice her existence and make no contact with her unless disturbed. But this indifference is not a reflection of their compassionate worldview; it stems rather from the fact that the chicken poses no serious threat and offers no financial gain. Indeed, the world of Hen is full of unpleasant types, from mafia to human traffickers. Even though we can follow them only as far as the chicken sees them, it’s fair to say they occupy an important place in the screenplay.
After convincing the audience of the chicken’s everyday troubles, Pálfi immediately tries to turn the main character into a representation. Within the framework the film offers, disadvantaged groups like women or migrants are not so different from the chicken in terms of their conditional freedoms — or at least that is the director’s proposition. These groups, whose lives depend on others’ initiative, are presented in the film as victims of a patriarchal society and a capitalist system. On the face of it, it’s not an entirely meaningless argument, but there are no ideas within the allegory Pálfi offers that make this claim convincing. Indeed, by using characters who can barely be called characters as one of the screenplay’s main tools, the film weakens its own narrative considerably. From a political perspective, I think it is just as problematic to code disadvantaged groups only through their victimhood as it is to use them as the raw material of a crude analogy.
Looking at recent examples of animal-centered fictional narratives, it is possible to find some parallels between Jerzy Skolimowski‘s EO and Hen. In his film that made a donkey the main character, Skolimowski too regarded human violence and cruelty as the primary threat, treating the donkey as one of countless victims. One of the biggest problems with scenarios like these — likely stemming from the difficulties of filming — is an overly panoramic narrative preference. When directors translate their experiment into a story, the screenplay, even if it doesn’t necessarily call for such sweeping claims, adopts a disjointed style of writing focused on meaningless cruelty. And unfortunately, as long as these side stories cannot offer the audience a sympathetic or at least interesting moment, this allegorical approach fails to land.
On the other hand, Pálfi consciously steps back from creating a provocative narrative like Taxidermia, in which he observed the intergenerational transmission of trauma. He chooses to see the chicken as a witness to human-caused neglect and senseless acts of violence. But in the story, there is no touch we haven’t seen in animated films with personified animals — we are simply watching a darker version of those. Considering that even the musical sequences in which the main character falls in love with a rooster in the henhouse are repeated twice, one gets the sense that Pálfi has become a more naive storyteller over the intervening years. Still, setting aside Hen‘s crowd-pleasing sympathy and observational stance, it is extremely difficult to see a narrative that can convey what it deals with with maturity. For the viewer, the strange excitement of watching a chicken for 90 minutes cannot be sustained due to the absence of a meaningful and coherent story — all that remains is a barren cycle of waiting for the next absurd scene.
To read more articles by Tunahan İbiş, click here.
Follow us on Youtube, X and Instagram for more.
Yorumlar