Review: Blood Tea and Red String

Blood Tea and Red String’s greatest innovation is a castle’s fountain water.

1
Blood Tea and Red String

Blood Tea and Red String’s greatest innovation is not the blood tea a group of rodents sip during a game of cards or the red string a spider with the face of a woman uses to encircle its prey, but a castle’s fountain water, which writer-director Christiane Cegavske conveys using what appears to be some form of plastic wrap. You could say that the only pleasure of this bloodless stop-motion animation, about aristocratic mice and fox-like animals with beaks for mouths vying for ownership of a raggedly handmade doll, are the finer points of its director’s many tableaus. When the doll with pubic-like tresses is stolen by the mice, the Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak launch a reconnaissance mission that almost ends in disaster when the animals eat Play-Doh berries whose hallucinogenic effects draw the animals into the jaws of carnivorous flora. Saved by a frog magician who feeds the plants autopsied hearts, the creatures go on to retrieve their doll, but not without loss: The egg that was stitched into the doll’s stomach a day earlier hatches shortly before the doll could be saved, releasing into the wind a blue bird with a face not unlike that of its surrogate mother’s. In a word, crazy, but while Cegavske’s craft, like her contributions to Asia Argento’s spastic The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, is nothing if not painstaking, her story unravels dispassionately, and with zero sexual innuendo—an arbitrary string of strange happenings that starve for subtext. The mice use money as leverage in one scene, recalling a similar scene from Jiri Barta’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin, only there is a clearer grasp in Barta’s sinister masterpiece of people’s thirst for dominance. Here, we don’t even get a sense of why the story’s crucial dolly is the bane of everyone’s existence.

Score: 
 Cast: Linda Hagood, Bella, Blue  Director: Christiane Cegavske  Screenwriter: Christiane Cegavske  Running Time: 69 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2006  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

1 Comment

  1. My take on the movie’s plot is it’s a fairy tale land dreamt up by someone (the girl/woman) who abandoned it. Perhaps she grew up, and stopped thinking about the fairy tale land she thought up and would go on adventures in. Maybe she died. Who knows. But, for some reason, her fairy tale land keeps existing. Some residents (the bat birds) have come to terms with her no longer visiting while others (the mice) long for the days she would. So, the mice commission the birds to make a replica of her. Once the birds do, they themselves realize how much they still miss her. So, they keep her while snubbing the mice. The egg possibly represents the fantasy world going along with the scheme and trying to actually bring to life a replica of the original creator. But, the mice steal her away, since they love her like and old friend and want to keel living in the past. The birds go looming for her. Events happen that seem distracting from the plot without conveying a clear purpose (eg they almost die in the labrynth). But, eventually, the egg hatches and the new simulation of the fairy tale world creator comes out.. As a small bird that immediately flies away. It could represent that the fantasy world is simulating the original creator’s essence, making her simulation a bird that’s trying to leave the fantasy world like the original creator did. But, the simulated creator gets caught in the spider’s web. The spider is a representation of real life. It’s something that’s gruesome, trapping things, and locking them away before being consumed. This is how real life can be, where hopes and dreama get caught and stomped out by reality. The bird version of the creator is caught, but the bird people negotiate her freedom.. But they find out she’s already dead. They accept it, and have the frog wrap her in leaves as a right of passage. But, the mice are still fixated on her. So, they bring the doll of her and try to find the bird she turned into. They love her so much they turned her doll into a bird as well by tying feathers to it. They want to be with her in whatever form she, takes. The mice end up at the bird tree, and a fight ensues between the bird folks and mice. The bird folks want to once again move on and get past having the creator there while the mice want to cling to the past. The doll of the creator is torn to pieces, and the bird folks realize how much in love with the creator and the past the mice are that they give up the pieces of the doll. It’s basically a sign of pity from the bird folks to the mice. The mice leave, left to still cherish the doll, which is getting tattered and worn out.. A symbol of their old relationship with her fading and of their desperation trying to cling to it instead of letting it (and her) go. The bird folks, however, send the burial pod the bird version of her was wrapped in downstream.. Letting go once again, so they can focus on living in the present. The real woman opening the leaf pod to find a gem is.. Not sure about that. Perhaps she’s giving herself some kind of closure for feeling bad about abandoning her old fairy tale world. The whole, move is surreal, but really sad when we think of it in terms of relationships, abandonment and someone’s ability to come to terms with it, or stay stuck in the past and rotting from it (everything around the mice was dead, bc they couldn’t move on). Anyways, that’s my interpretation.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.