The film “The Wondrous World of Louis Wain” is nothing for cat haters, who probably couldn’t be consoled with Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy in a double pack. This is about the invention of the cat as a pet, or more precisely: as a life-determining, cute domestic tyrant. Cumberbatch perfectly understood the quintessential essence of Wain’s accomplishments as he now describes in interviews how on the film set some of contemporary cinema’s highest-paid stars patiently waited for the starring cats to voluntarily do what the script asked of them at some point. Cats are deaf to stage directions. And Will Sharpe, who directed “The Wondrous World of Louis Wain,” was determined to work with real cats rather than digitally processed images.
The Englishman Louis Wain was a big star in the late 19th century, so big that he was brought to America – and then he fell into oblivion. Wain might have called himself an inventor, but above all he was a draftsman, and he made his sketches with inimitable speed, for newspapers even before there were photographs. 1886 appeared in the London Illustrated News more than a hundred drawings of humanized cats made by Wain. This is how he became a world-famous draftsman, with increasing insanity a pioneer of psychedelic art, but above all the founder of a cat cult, without whom half of the Internet would be empty today.
After the death of his father, he has to support his mother and his five sisters
After the cowboy role in “The Power of the Dog”, Cumberbatch has chosen a character in Louis Wain who is the opposite in almost everything: a sentimental eccentric. Louis is too good for this world, sweet and devoted, willing but unworldly. A fragile genius like Alan Turing, the Cumberbatch in “The Imitation Game” has played.
Louis is restless, but he doesn’t have the strength for what reality demands of him. After the death of his father in 1880, at the age of just twenty, he was the only man in a family of seven and was supposed to support five sisters and their mother. And pay for a governess. So comes Emily (Claire Foy, the young Elizabeth from “The Crown”) into the house, and Louis needs a job to pay for her – because he’s head over heels in love with her. The scenes in which the two sneak around each other, as Victorian etiquette demands, and then throw them uninhibitedly overboard thrive on the chemistry between Cumberbatch and Foy, they characterize this relationship: playchild and governess. They marry and move into a house from which you can only see the silhouette of London on the horizon behind the fields. And soon he’s sitting on the edge of her bed, the scene really makes you cry, and in a disguised voice he lets the kitten they found outside speak. What is wrong with you? He knows the answer, but she gives it to him anyway: I have cancer.
That of the cats in the bed, which until then were more for mousing, is her legacy – Louis begins to draw kittens as a satire on human behavior, becomes chairman of the cat owners’ association, and Peter, the kitten from the garden, becomes the center of his existence. Unfortunately – even in reality – he did not have the rights to his pictures protected. And so they are a success that does not pay off.
Sharpe’s narration degenerates into a revue at times, traversing the stages of Wain’s life, but there are a few moments where the juxtaposition of art and madness can be traced quite well. Jumping between episodes is perhaps appropriate for telling the story of a man who couldn’t find his footing. It’s a crazy life of nightmares, fears and confused ideas – and Sharpe pulls it all off quite well, until the memories mix with the future and the screen begins to show the patterns that are becoming more and more cute in Wain’s Cat images crept the further his mind drifted from reality.
“The Wondrous World of Louis Wain” is not a perfect film, but maybe exactly what it wanted to be. Wain’s theories about the ubiquitous electricity moving through time are gibberish, but his devotion to the cats represents his relationship to everything; a man whose life is one long loss of control loves the untameable, even if it means he’ll never be at peace. Luck is a cat, it subjugates people, is difficult to grasp and flees at the slightest discord.
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, Great Britain 2021 – Director: Will Sharpe. Screenplay: Will Sharpe, Simon Stephenson. Camera: Eric Wilson. Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough, Toby Jones. Studio Canal, 111 minutes.