TOMCAT

Austria, 2016, 120 minutes, Colour.
Lukas Turtur, Philipp Hochmair.
Directed by Klaus Handl.

While Tomcat is a story about a cat, Moses, it is also the story about two men, partners in their house on the outskirts of Vienna.

The film offers a gay sensibility, a portrait of the two men, middle-aged, sharing their lives, some explicit sexual encounter sequences, daily living. One of them plays in an orchestra and also teaches music students. The other is in administration.

The film also as a great number of musical sequences, practice, rehearsals, performance of the orchestra. There are also sequences of members of the orchestra gathering together for meals afterwards.

Moses has an important role in the lives of the two men as well of the neighbours. When Moses dies, the grief of the two is enormous but it also protects precipitates and crisis. One of them has been holding Moses at the table as it is dies, and the question arises as to whether the man has actually killed it. This is certainly an interpretation and the rest of the film is about the two men having to deal with the situation, the one blaming himself, and being blamed by the other, and the emotional relationship, tension in the house, the man responsible for to the ground and gouging out his eye as he falls from a branch.

There is also the possibility of having new cat and a neighbour letting them have a white kitten for the time being.

The emotional crisis, the sexual crisis, the tension between the two takes its toll on each of them – but, eventually they are over able to overcome the difficulties and resume the relationship.