Competition
Dir. Dragan Bjelogrlić
The characters in the film
are often wiping out their tears. One would say – isn’t it usual for a
Eastern European film about some events of the 20th century? – and would
be completely wrong. Because those are the tears of joy. Dragan
Bjelogrlić’s film is unique in its own way for contemporary cinema – it
is optimistic all the way through. The movie starts with a scene of
virtuosic football play performed by a young boy called Tirke. As it
usually goes, Tirke find it difficult to find a job, which saddens his
mother, but constantly insists that he has a strong moral core,
conscience and ethics instead. And when Tirke’s skills are noticed by
Bosko Simonovic, the feature coach of the national team… Well, the
following course of the film is easy to predict: up to a huge success of
Serbian national team in the play vs. Bulgaria.
It is
interesting to watch this almost chemical reaction, which is being built
by the director: to watch a few dashing boys create an almost sacred
fraternity and develop such “triumph of will” that it seems like they
could make almost anything. Let’s say, to get to World Cup in
Montevideo, where they didn’t even hoped to come. Or knock teeth out of a
jerky son of the Prime Minister. Or to dislocate from jail to royal
castle… It seems like they could really make anything.
The
subplot “soccer instead of war” starts to sound in the film in a subtle
way: everybody knows, what’s going to happen in Europe in a few years,
when it will be no time for sport (the action takes place in 1930). FIFA
has just been created. World Cup in Montevideo is the first one in
history. Most of the characters in the film take words “soccer” and
“Montevideo” as some kind of swearing and can’t understand how grown up
men can waste their time on this. Of how can anyone barter away a
position of apprentice at the factory “Ikarus” to be a leading forward
in the national team… Films about people who put their houses up, lie to
their relatives and risk everything, believing in nothing but their
dream, have some purgative meaning. So after “Montevideo” one would
probably want to let all the routine fly, throw away the cell phone,
right here, by the cinema hall, and run away anywhere where the real
life is.
And in the same time Serbs would not be themselves, if
their national tragedy didn’t reflect through the football drive of the
film. The King is willing to send “the national team of Yugoslavia” to
the championship, but on a condition that there will be some Croations
in there. The Croations refuse. A local tycoon is ready to put his money
in the trip, but only if the team will be called Serbian, and not
Yugoslavian. It is the team now who says no… And so you start to shiver
unwillingly, when you hear the words: “Yugoslavia has signed a
convention with the court in Hague”.
It is not without a reason
that the film may seem simple-minded at first. The key to it lies in the
words, that are pronounced in the first minutes on screen. “It was the
best decade – after the big war… Then we didn’t yet what a real big war
means”. The times before war are always simple-minded. In fact, the 21st
of June in 1941 in Russian films is filled with sounds of “Riorita”.
The
best players of the film, Tirke and Mosa are often having fun playing
with a raw chicken egg. And a prophecy is told: ones who are able not to
break the egg by playing with it, are going to die soon. The real Mosa
(Blagoje Marjanovic) and Tirke (Aleksandar Tirnanic), the stars of
soccer, have lived a long life. But artistic world has its own laws.
And you never know, what’s waiting for these dashing boys after “the
best decade” will be over.
Igor Saveliev
Competition
Dir. Levan Tutberidze
You must be a football fan
to understand how the protagonist, a 38-year-old writer Zaza, managed to
make a large scoop. Otherwise his exclamations about sir Alex Fergusson
and Jose Alvalade, who owns a stadium in Lisbon, will be gibberish to
the viewer. Even more so because Zaza uses it in everyday life. He
welcomes the women going to the funeral with the words: “Ah, Sicilian
weepers! Let me introduce myself. Gaetano Donizetti! Gaetano, very
pleased!” Yes, Zaza won at the football pools, so don’t imagine anything
about underground lotteries in Tbilisi. As for the money for the bet,
it was borrowed from an old drug dealer, whose fridge will be the
convergence point for all the paths in this tangled story with a strong
criminal taste a la Guy Ritchie. Having clarified the point about the
football pools it would be noble to let the viewer get the pleasure of
puzzling out the rest.
We would like to focus on how the
filmmakers use the wide screen, which was rare in Georgian cinema even
in Soviet times (only Abuladze’z “The Entreaty” comes to mind), while
for the cinema of the independent Georgia this is downright
extraordinary. When in some country filmmakers start using the wide
screen, it means the cinema of this country has gained sufficient
momentum. But the pretty dilapidated Tbilisi of the present day is not a
very good setting for the wide screen and the director Tutberidze found
a witty and probably the only possible way out, using glamorous foreign
visual quotations as pieces of the puzzle. They are of such diverse
origin, that one can’t help being amazed at the director’s knowledge of
cinema. Perhaps that is the origin of the line of dialogue in the movie,
which expresses a very sane idea: “When you watch something alone, you
become wiser”. For example when during a pause in the rehearsal one of
the characters, a ballerina, records Zaza’s favourite song “Can’t Take
My Eyes Off Of You” on his cell-phone at his request, she walks across
the stage under the flashlights of different colors, which cast colorful
patches of light around her silhouette, and comes to a stop under a
box, decorated with stucco mouldings and gilt like a temple. This is a
direct quotation from the wide-screen musical “Corps-de-ballet” (the
item called “Nothing”) which Tutberidze must have surely seen in Soviet
cinemas at the time of his own film debut “Nazare’s Last Prayer”. Then
characters who do not know each other, enter one and the same house,
ring the doorbell, receive no answer and leave, walking further down the
street. The camera pans on the first person from the roof, then up
again, letting the first depart and the second approach during the same
shot, and then pans down again. This is a quotation from the newest
cinema. Gaspar Noé for example used this technique to record the
wanderings of his characters, including the departing soul, through
Tokyo in “Enter the Void”. Tutberidze, the author of the Georgian
box-office hit “Trip to Karabakh” could have seen the film in Cannes,
for example.
But even more interesting than the use of the new
scale, unfamiliar not only to himself, but to the country, was one
daring, indecent and, by consequence, immediately alluring association.
Having sex with a prostitute in the sauna the gangster Mamuka almost at
the moment of orgasm looks at his groin and remembers that the automatic
gun which was used to shoot his friend to death today, had a red
handle, bent like a banana (there is an immediate cross-cut to the
automatic gun, which is currently store in the fridge). When the
director’s logic can baffle you to that extent, it is worthwhile to say
after the screening that while we were all having a good time, somewhere
out there in the world cinema a great original was born!
Alexey Vasiliev
Competition
Dir. Feliks Falk
The fascist occupation of Krakow.
Another anti-Jewish raid catches little Róza and her mother in a café,
where she is enjoying cakes on the occasion of her sixth birthday.
Mother tells her to run to the church and wait for her there. Róza’s
mother never comes but Joanna, a young average woman her mother’s age
will take the girl to live with her in a sturdy old house. On the chest
of drawers there is a photo of Joanna and a young man, both wearing ski
suits. They are herself and Zbyshek on the snow-covered range in Tatry
during their holiday in Zakopane, when he proposed to her. Joanna waits
for Zbyshek to comeback from the front and in the meantime hides Róza
from the concierge’s curious gaze and reads her fairy tales in the
evenings.
As a director Feliks Falk became known with his late
1970s movie “Wodzirej”, which our old-time moviegoers are likely to
remember. It was the time when Zanussi very closely approached the
formula of Polish Catholic melodrama, which will be exemplified in its
purest form by his films based on events in the rear during the second
world war («Rok spokojnego slonca», «Wherever You Are...»), and
Kieslowski, who purified the genre in “Dekalog”, was getting ready to
direct his feature-film debut. The essence of Polish Catholic melodrama
is to show the world and the people surrounding the protagonist as walls
which are gradually closing in and pushing the character out of this
world (suicide or madness is the usual outcome for characters in these
movies) which can be discerned in the light imperceptibly falling on
the forehead of the heroine like a gloomy halo, or sometimes
illuminating inanimate objects (like a boiling kettle in the hospital in
Zanussi’s “Bilans kwartalny”). The same light barely touches Joanna’s
curls, while the events of the movie, the retelling of which will deny
you the pleasure of discovering the plot while watching the film, are
nothing else but her gradual ousting from life. The claustrophobic
effect is achieved by deadly blush hues of the flat and nearby streets,
by frequents shots of the front door hall with the fateful figure of the
postman in the shade and incessant ringing of the door bells, vigorous
knocks, rattle of door chains on the soundtrack which the Russian
mentality immediately associates with Mandelshtam’s poem about Leningrad
reworked by Pugacheva.
Falk’s new film is conceived in such
lofty traditions that even the almost total lack of originality can’t be
called a drawback or a miscalculation: we don’t blame the organist for
being faithful to Bach’s original. But there are a couple of surprise
after all. One of them is the paradoxical, unusual, but fairly
legitimate interpretation of one of the liveliest and most relevant
French novels of the 19th century - Stendhal’s “Le Rouge et le Noir” -
by the German officer. The second is the finale (which can be safely
disclosed in the films of this genre because it is part of the formula).
Instead of Polish classic filmmakers it calls to mind a German classic:
Joanna walks away along the snow-covered range of the Tatry holding
that very photo from the chest of drawers just like Anselm does in the
closing lines of Hermann Hesse’s tale, when he completed the transition
from this world to the spiritual world by retreating into an iris bud,
which opened like a cave. In his youth it was the focus of his fantasies
about invisible universes.
Alexey Vasiliev
Perspectives
Dir. Fabien Gaillard
This is a movie about the
guy who went too far in the direct and (as many would say) indirect
sense of the word. Paul from Limoges is a young man of about 30. He has
been living in Shanghai for a long time now, he speaks Chinese fluently
and introduces himself as Da Bao, although his round European peasant
face won’t cheat anyone as far as his origins are concerned, especially
when he rides his bike among steaming pots with fragrant foods in his
woolen cap pulled over his ears and a tight jacket like some character
from the early videos of “Pet Shop Boys”. He has accepted China as his
new motherland but he is not bent on Eastern practices and even his
first falling-out with his new girlfriend arises because, in his
opinion, the food she cooks for him is too spicy and too Eastern.
Actually, it is the familiar story about the love of the Brave Tin
Soldier. He makes his living offering computer assistance, but
exclusively as a freelancer. When his former sweetheart invites him to a
party in the hope of introducing him to an over-dressed lady boss of a
big company and talking about his permanent job, he will get drunk, bawl
out songs, fall asleep and turn the job interview into an ugly farce.
When another company fails to transfer the money to his credit card on
time he will turn up at the office and kick up another brawl shoving
business papers to the floor. It is right, work must be paid for and he
is not going to work.
In this movie nobody cares for the
everyday routine, neither the camera, nor he, nor his girlfriend Mei
played by Dan Tong Han whose striking model appearance is enough to make
everyone forgive her hysterics and bouts of depression facing the wall
and for whose smile one is ready to pay a million. But instead it is
very important to observe what exercises the aged from the health group
are doing in the park today, what pensioners are playing backgammon in
the yard and to see the expression on the faces of working guys coming
home on the ferry across Yangtze this evening. The latter episode will
take place when the action shifts to Wǔhàn, deeper into the mainland,
where Mei's family home is and where she will escape having suspected
her bridegroom of unfaithfulness. His watch by the princess’s palace
will come down to his daily appearances in Wǔhàn 's street karaoke with
his own songs.
It is a movie in which the denial of present-day
corporate and social priorities in favor of non-violent but stubborn
pursuit of one’s own immediate interests is the way to achieve the very
basic and fundamental priority – the real noisy family dinner party
where everyone is at one with everyone else. And besides it is a film
where we hear the phrase: “To gain something you must first lose it, to
get something first let it go; just like smoking a cigarette: when I
smoke it, look, I let it go”. Cigarette smoke floats over the sleepy
Yangtze and the utterance liners in thin air as a worthy object of deep
meditation: after all, despite the director’s French name it is an
utterly Chinese film.
AlexeY Vasiliev
Perspectives
Dir. Gaziz Nasyrov
Certain year of the 2000s. A
journalist of some big paper, Tamerlan finds himself tied to a battery
in some basement premise, after he was taken and kept hostage by
mysterious group of men in black masks with eye holes. Tamerlan is
instinctively preparing himself to lie about anything that he can be
asked about. He tries to recall of the biased articles he has written
recently, but can’t remember anything that could possible lead to this
situation. Meanwhile, his capturers come to him and, using knocks and
pastes, motivate him to make a virtual trip in time, going back to the
eve of 2000 – the days, when Tamerlan and four other students of the
philosophy department have just graduated and have been thinking what to
next with their lives.
Two of these characters decide to move
forward (one, focusing on his career, and the other – on his family),
the only girl in the company also makes an ultimate decision – but in
another direction – and commits suicide. And there are only Tamerlan and
Kostya Paniotis who literally get stuck at some point of time and
space. Having stayed in students’ dormitory, empty at summer days, they
decide to rent a free room by the hour. Their clients, who altogether
symbolize the sum of all human misfortunes and loneliness, are often
paying with valuable effects, which young philosophers call “adequations
of time”. Time here is really the protagonist of the film, that submits
the whole aesthetics of it – starting from specific, slate-grey colors
of the film and ending with the voice-over, which – in a style of Julio
Cortázar – is read from the second person and in future tense. Time is
also the general theme of young philosophers’ conversations (in one
episode Kostya manages to explain the theory of the forth dimension
while getting drunk with his friend). And they are philosophers for a
reason, which is to show their double revery: not only they represent
the generation lost between two epochs, between the past and the present
of the country, but they are also graduated in such rare and
unfortunate specialty, which never occurs to be profession – only the
state of mind. And non-linear structure of the film finally builds up to
be universal model of human memory that always functions like that –
with random pieces of memories suddenly coming up in mind. And all of
the film’s “magical realism”, that subtly suggests that student
dormitory can symbolize a kind of a limbo, turns out be quite natural in
the system given. All of the important events have already taken place
in the past. Time is ruthlessly sweeping away everything that stands in
its way, and a person can sometimes find himself at the point of
crossing of two time lines. In Stephen King’s novel creates called
Langoliers came in such cases, literally swallowing yesterday away; it
is not a hard job to believe that sometimes this function can be easily
performed by a few man in black masks.
Olga Artemieva
Competition
Dir. Lucio Pellegrini
To the traditionally
disturbing sounds of tango performed in an intentionally carefree way
(bravo the composer Gabriele Roberto!) the white introductory titles
speed away along the white separator (hello, Almodovar and the final
titles in “Kika”) alternately chasing two vehicles. The cool shining
auto with sleek doctor Mario Tirelli at the wheel (Pier Francesco
Favino) moves along the streets of Rome. The doctor has a leather
attache-case. The coughing motorcycle of doctor Luca (Stefano Accorsi)
travels along African roads. The greasy doctor has a UNISEF bag over his
shoulder. The doctors are around 40 years old. Once they were fellow
students, courted one and the same girl, but the girl chose the one that
seemed more promising and 12 years ago they went their separate ways.
Now in his own flat even when he is most high-strung, he can’t smoke a
good cigar without being nagged – the girl has grown into a vegetarian
bent on cleanliness and a healthy way of life. Doctor Luca smokes
whenever he pleases, almost in the presence of women in labor. Doctor
Mario packs a fur hat and gloves into his suitcase and flies to the
African village to meet doctor Luca. Some time later the local plane
will bring their common fastidious acquaintance to the same backwater.
As the laws of comedy demand, pretty soon the fstidious girl will eat a
stake prepared from the meat of the cow, which her friends slaughtered
virtually before her very eyes; under the blazing sun the disheveled,
dead drunk doctor Mario will curse his entire life, in savory and
melodious Italian interspersing his speech with hilarious “testa di
homosecco”, while the most aloof and wild Negro boy, perched on his
knee, will sympathetically examine him with a stethoscope.
It is a
comedy which can be compared to “L'africain” by Philippe de Broca, still
the warmly remembered by the viewers of the mid-80s movie.
Essentially
the same conflict, the same goofy African texture spanning from side to
side of the wide screen, the same rickety planes, the flights and
landings of which are accomplished to superb film music (in general in
“La vita facile” the music is used very thoughtfully and to the point).
Most certainly none of the present-day European actors in their early
forties, no matter how talented they are, could boast of the same
legendary film reputation as Deneuve and Noiret at the time of
“L'africain”. The cinema is different and the times are different.
Nevertheless Favino exudes the 220 volts of the charm of the robust and
somewhat lost Italian male and mother’s boy simultaneously. Accorsi, who
shared the screen time with him in such hits of the Apennines of the
new age as “The last Kiss” and “Romanzo criminale” is cast against type
to say the least. Some three or four insanely funny episodes do not
overshadow the general lyrical intonation, although the adventurist
overtones found in the new movie as well, have a very different
function.
Should someone ask the question what is such a comedy,
light as the life mentioned in the title, doing in the competition of
the A-class international film festival, the answer will be simple: its
recipe has long been lost while its significance has grown. Just think
of it: what do they show on TV more often - “L'africain” or “The Legend
of Narayama” which won the Palme d’Or the same year? And there will be
no more questions.
Besides the Moscow Festival of the Soviet epoch
did not treat comedies condescendingly. While the West indulged in now
partially forgotten and far less relevant “waves”, it awarded prizes to
“Serafino” (Italy) and “Mimino” (USSR), “Le Corniaud” (France) and “The
Great Race” (USA), «Operazione San Gennaro» (Italy) and «Das Spukschlob
Im Spessart» (FRG) which are still familiar even to schoolchildren. But
this is a theme for a special discussion.
Alexey Vasiliev
Competition
Dir. Alberto Morais
The film by the Catalonian
Morais is preceded by an epigraph of the legendary photographer Robert
Capa. It is taken from his impressions of the inhuman conditions the
prisoners of the French concentration camp of Argelès-sur-mer suffered
in March 1939. For a non-Spanish viewer, who is nonetheless interested
in the newest history of Western Europe, the situation becomes
sufficiently clear to understand the message of the film and enjoy it
fully, but it is still worthwhile to explain what sort of camp it was.
After General Franco’s victory in the Civil War tens of thousands of
Catalonian Republicans streamed in columns towards the French border,
moving at night. They risked being air bombed and when they reached the
border they were not welcome there. When they had been disinfected for
fear of lice, painstakingly searched and studied by the local
gendarmerie, they were sent to a refugee camp on the Mediterranean
coast, where most barracks did not have even plank-beds, but had
unsanitary conditions. Hunger was aggravated by the discontent of the
locals about the refugees eating their food. The arrival of the fascists
in France further complicated the situation. On the other hand, many
heroes who defended democracy with arms, as well as women and children
perished from starvation and epidemics long before the Germans came.
Now
that you have a clear understanding of the aim, you can set out on the
journey to that very Argelès in an old car with a lost 80-year-old
protagonist from Valencia. It is a journey where at first you feel bored
of everything from the peeling bridges and impersonal agglomerations of
new houses to the news over the car radio. But once you buy a “Lucky
Strike” pack in a café at the gas station, tear away the filter, inhale
and spit the tobacco like you did back in those days when these
cigarettes were given out as part of the army rations, everything
changes. You turn the dial of the radio and hear nice guitar music and
you can find road companions to share a glass and shy gestures of
attention.
The movie is shot exclusively with a static camera,
sometimes through the windshield or suburban train window when the
protagonist is going somewhere. There are only 5 or 6 panoramas,
signaling the transition to a different state, when old Miguel sees old
detachments and columns on the intact portions of the road and once when
he wakes up and enters the club where his newly found musician friends
are rehearsing their evening concert. Thanks to this device about twenty
minutes into the movie the images start chasing each other like real
waves. Several of them, as is usually the case, are stronger and more
persistent than others. They push us from the outer world into the inner
universe and back. The movie can cause motion sickness but towards the
finale everything falls into place and becomes a sort of meditation on
the same theme which is discussed in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “An Artist of the
Floating World”. It is good that the location of the former
concentration camp is now occupied by various bars and in the closing
shot Miguel, smoking his “Lucky Strike” on a bench, wishes happiness to
the inhabitants of the newly built houses and office workers who grew up
in places of his pre-war youth just like the old artist did in the
novel. The only difference is that instead of the June sun shining in
the novel, behind Miguel’s back there is a worker from the café sweeping
away fallen leaves.
Soviet viewers will find Miguel’s aim
doubly justified when they recognize Marthe Villalonga, one of the
favorite comedy actresses, the mother of Coluche in “Banzai”, in the
lady for whose sake the journey was undertaken. Although the world is
floating and life is but short, there she is (at least in long shots)
just as before sipping the good old pastis in her eternal costume of the
provincial sitting duck of the 1950s.
Alexey Vasiliev
Competition
Dir. Charlotte Silvera
In 2008 after a prolonged
interval French cinema won back the Palme d’Or in Cannes with the movie
“Klass”. The event was followed by an avalanche of movies about
discontent at school, which – just to be objective – reflected the real
importance of the problems in French education. Last year Isabelle
Adjani got a “Cesar” for “La journée de la jupe” where she defended
herself with Moliere and Racine against a whole class of partially armed
with the guns of the multicolored ignoramuses tribe. In contrast to the
above mentioned movies, in “Escalade” a more exquisite group of
schoolchildren will ring the doorbell of Alice Naba (played by Karmen
Maura) on the day of her birthday. Their parents are fathers of the
city, just one call from them is sufficient to save the life of the
teacher’s mother who urgently needs a kidney transplant. In return they
want answers to the forthcoming final tests. Their reasoning is
rational, each has selected a path in life where he won’t need this or
that subject. Their examples will put to shame Adjani’s teacher: “De
Gaulle was unable to put two and two together, Kafka would have become
Kafka even without mathematics”. They have at their disposal the latest
gadgets, the super-phones which will let them, in case of a refusal –
which they get, – instantly simulate an orgy with the participation of
the teacher and circulate it over the Internet.
If to the Russian
viewer it sounds familiar, he is right: we are dealing with a foreign
interpretation of Lyudmila Razumovskaya’s play “Dear Elena Sergeevna”.
The screen version by Eldar Ryazanov appeared at the height of
Perestroika. It was rough and inappropriate (a disappointing
miscalculation by our favorite director) like a dressing-down of pupils
at a komsomol meeting for going to watch “Kabaret” instead of sitting at
a lesson and aroused an uproar in the newspaper “Ucnitelskaya gazeta”.
At the same time the debut work of the director of “Escalade” Charlotte
Silvera called “Louise... l'insoumise” was released in our theatres. It
remined almost unnoticed, but was full of compassion for the
schoolchildren. Very well, mademoiselle Silvera and her schoolchildren
have grown up and noticed that a new generation has succeeded them and
it is full of shit. With all their gadgets they are shallow, have no
life experience, have not lived through the dramas of life which provide
the key to survival. In this sense it seems interesting to compare
“Escalade” to the recent “Scream 4” which contains similar observations
about the generation gap.
In the beginning of “Escalade” Karmen
Maura dressed in a wrap-over dress (which, as Elisabeth Taylor used to
say, beautifies the woman of any age and built) opens a bottle of port
wine with a savoury “pop” to pour herself a morning glass and we
immediately understand that unlike Razumovskaya’s play, the battle will
not be fought against the background of the teacher mumbling about the
classics and morality. With the inimitable possessed expression with
which Maura added sleeping pills to gazpacho in “Women on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown”, the teacher stuffs mineral water with laxatives and
emetics. Now one of the pupils can no longer leave the toilet and in
the doorway he sees that the woman, who only a minute ago was unable to
get up because of the leg trauma, is sneaking in the darkness with a
knife. Her tormentors realize that with their idiotic phones they were
unlucky enough to find themselves in the wrong cinema. The old cinema.
With which the new cinema can never compare, in no epoch, ever. And
their teacher is an actress from Almodovar’s movies of the time when he
was still bursting with energy and could defend his eternally drunken
characters with a leather lash.
Alexey Vasiliev
Competition
Dir. Ivan Vladimirov, Valeri Yordanov
Six people
escape from Sofia. Their flight is depicted humorously, dashingly and
briefly: for example, the camera is watching trough the shop window how
the 50-year-old drunkard slaps his woman across the face. The next
moment a girl in working clothes runs into the café, he pushes her
outside, but she immediately reappears to pour his beer on his head.
Almost a silent comedy. Running their separate ways they utter lines of
dialogue from which we learn unbearably tragic stories which were wisely
left out by the authors so as not to insult the film medium with their
prints. One of them was writing a script and meticulously repaired
furniture in his rented flat. The landlady knew about his plight and
constantly raised the rent so that he was forced to take more and more
orders which seriously interfered with his script. Another was speeding
to the village to see his father and almost bumped into his coffin. The
third one, still very young, started out as a successful boxer, but
earned five haematomas in his head which now cause him to lose his
temper at the wrong moment and beat up policemen whom his drunken mind
mistakes for hoodlums.
All together they will end up on the sea
shore. Here the compulsive race of the stories stops, giving way to a
different rhythm. Jackets and working clothes are shed. Their bodies
suddenly become agile and their arms which were created to embrace
someone, are open to the sun and the sea, the honest eyes and the lips
hungry for a kiss are open to the camera which one of them is carrying
and with which they share their intimacies. Their stories are strikingly
different from those we heard in the beginning like the ones about the
greedy landlady, alcoholic mother and wanderings about Sofia night
clubs. “I am going back to the village and I am taking my brother with
me. If need be, I’ll cut this city from his brain with a chainsaw”, says
one of them. “In the East when a warrior dies, they say he went West.
I’ll head the other way. I’ll shine on you from the East. With no fear
and shame. Free and proud”, - promises the other. “What do I hate?
People. No, not that. I hate the people, who force me to be ashamed of
myself” - muses the third, drawing deeply on his cigarette and looking
straight into the camera.
I heard one Indian astrologist say:
“The unhappy man is the one who is out of his mind”. “Sneakers” is a
movie about six people who have broken loose from someone else’s mind
and are beginning to live by their own brains. What turns this film into
a masterpiece – ad this is undoubtedly the long awaited masterpiece –
is the acting among other things. Six impeccable acting accomplishments:
from the ones by acknowledged stars like the sad clown Ivan Barnev (“I
Served the King of England”) who is booked for years ahead in Bulgaria
and “Sneakers” co-director Valeri Yordanov (“Stolen Eyes”, “Crayfish”)
to the debutant Ivo Arykov whose work in Javor Gardev’s theatrical
production of “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?” was blessed by the author
himself – Edward Albee – just like Tennessee Williams once blessed the
young Pierce Brosnan. The comparison is justified. The guy is incredibly
handsome and taking into account that his interests spread from
Strindberg to animated films like “Just You Wait!”, there is just one
way to describe the feeling when you listen to his monologue about
becoming a simple manual laborer – heart attack. Orson Wells used to
say: “If I had two lives, I would have devoted one of them entirely to
the cocaine”. Arykov plays his boxer as though he were living his second
life to the fullest, the one for which he would have had to forget
Strindberg and would have never know Albee, but which would have been so
sweet to live: the simple life of a handsome guy, whose existence is so
easy up to a certain point but whom the state and society use as cannon
fodder with sadistic pleasure and consistency worthy of a better
application.
Skillfully using the wide screen the authors switch
to amateur camera now and then, the one that accompanies the characters.
The smoke from the fire still lingers, the same bagpipe of a stray
Zambian is heard off-screen, but the morning mist clears already on the
screen of the amateur camera. Only the tune is constant. The melting
clouds and the earthly images, which time and again turn into cinema,
remind us of the uneven light of Maya. Messiah from Richard Bach’s story
of the sane mane took the protagonist to the movies to explain to him
the meaning of earthly life: “When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
were dying you cried, you would have given up your life for them, but
you did not die. Watch your own life like you watched this movie”. The
time will come to remember these words when “Sneakers” take you to the
closing scene.
Alexey Vasiliev
Competition
Dir. Judit Elek
All happy families are happy in
the same way, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. That
is the case in Judit Elek’s movie. The Romanian and the Swedish families
have very little in common. What could a Transylvanian forester and a
respectable West-European lady have in common? Nothing. And still at
some point they start the inexorable movement towards each other from
points “A” and “B”, traversing the frontiers… Do they want this meeting?
No. But… It depends… Will they meet? No. Though…
Judit Elek is
one of the most experienced Hungarian directors (she began filming in
the 50s and is considered a representative of the “first generation” of
the founders of Hungarian cinema). She ventured to experiment on a large
scale, juxtaposing three epochs, three worlds on the screen – Hitler
occupation, the West and developed socialism. The latter is taken in its
most flagrant form familiar from the usual first-hand stories: when
Perestroika was under way in the USSR, Soviet people, who came to
Bucharest and tried to talk to the “aborigines” in the way they had
already got used to on TV, they met with horrified glances and fingers
pointing at the ceilings in the hotels, which meant that everything was
bugged.
The movie is set long before the Soviet Perestroika, in
1980. Katherine, a Jew of Hungarian-Romanian origin living in Sweden
ventures to come to Transylvania, which she had left at the age of 7.
She was taken to the death camp and miraculously survived: her relatives
dismantled the floor in the freight car, but only a child could squeeze
through the opening…
Almost everything in this country reminds
Katherine of a Holocaust, it might even seem that the director indulges
in flashbacks. The border guard turns into a Gestapo soldier (while the
curt, barking noises in the background prove to be a football broadcast
and not the Führer’s speech); people lying along the walls in the dark
bring back a lot of memories, but it is a usual socialist hotel: no more
rooms and the lights are out. When after all the dramatic events on the
Romanian soil the car with the Swedish number plates crosses the
roadway barrier, Katherine’s little daughter asks: “Is it OK to sing
now?” and hears the answer: “Yes, now everything is OK”.
Meanwhile
the forester Teletski does not yield to his wife’s entreaties and
refuses to beget a child: “I don’t want to make babies for them, I don’t
want my son to become a murderer”. At the same time it is for “them”
that he himself prepares the hunting ground, for Ceausescu who is due to
shoot bears here. And the moment you think about the paradoxical notion
of “murder” in the context (in a few years the opponents of the regime
will themselves finish off the Ceausescus), the forester’s rifle fires
and soon Teletski is wanted for double murder. Evidently paradoxes of
the 20th century cannot be understood without Shakespearean plot twists.
Igor Saveliev