Yellow Curiosity: A Sphinx and a Poster Boy

"... We have to accept the possibility of total darkness, no purpose, no direction, no intention, no goal in order to be open, to listen, to see, to live. And it’s glorious! We exist, we create and it’s a miracle... We are mystic warriors on a personal quest..." (Daniel Fawcet and Clara Pais, The Underground Film Studio: An Interview in 12 parts. Part 1: On Avant-Gardism and the Purpose of Art)

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Blue Love: A Centaur and a Lady

... As he was trotting across the Nameless Vastness, carrying a lady asleep on his back, he remembered his past lives and rejoiced that he had finally become a Centaur...

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Paper Kids (Shane Ryan, 2016)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼

Shane Ryan's cinema is one of brutal honesty, no compromises and raw lyricism, especially when it comes to his portraiture of social outcasts, as well as exploration of sensitive topics and dark side of human nature. In that regard, his most penetrative, yet not the best works are The Girl Who Wasn't Missing which focuses on the ramblings of a 15-yo rape victim, Echo, and My Name is 'A' by anonymous which is based on a real life murder committed by a group of mentally unstable teenage girls.

For Paper Kids - a short version of a feature in making God Got Ill and a spiritual sequel to the aforementioned films, Ryan completely eschews dialogue in favor of the music video-like imagery that is initially gentle, evocative and somewhat mystifying, only to gradually shed its skin into something grittier and more biting. (He takes the similar approach with a post-apocalyptic 80'sploitation Guerrilla.)

During the first half of this 20-minute experimental drama symbolically opening with the sunset, he utilizes on-screen 'tags' to identify his protagonists all of whom are played with unaffected simplicity by non-professional juveniles and young adolescents. Their wistful stares and idling around (streets, fairgrounds and empty beaches) reflect apathy, revolt, isolation, sadness or the mixture thereof, with the reasons for the 'sulking' becoming clearer in the second act and resolving epilogue.

Aimlessly wandering while trying to escape from the clutches of reality, the children (from the posters that no sane parent would want to see) are lovingly captured with a hand-held camera at their most vulnerable, every moment acting as a verse of an emotionally devastating poem. The tonal shifts which correspond with the chaos ruling their young, unprotected lives are marked by the changes in aural landscapes turning from soothingly ethereal into disturbingly piercing. A few instances of nudity are not intended to titillate or produce a cheap shock effect, but to emphasize the dreariness of the subjects' unenviable situation.

(The review is based on the screener provided by the author.)

Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters (Hiroyuki Seshita & Kōbun Shizuno, 2017)

☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼

The latest offering from Polygon Pictures (Knights of Sidonia, Blame!) is - strictly visually speaking - probably their best work so far (apart from the titular monster and its Pterosaur-like kin that look as if their skin was made of carbonized wood), with beautifully rendered cel-shaded frames in stylishly flashy abundance, but in the story department, it falls flat as a tasteless pancake, boring you to death with tons of dull exposition, mind-numbing technobabble and the blandest of characters you could ever imagine, and not to mention that it ends with a cliffhanger after some of those utterly uninvolving protagonists are blasted to death during the final, action-oriented yet unsatisfying act.

What Makes Me Take the Train (Pierre Mazingarbe, 2013)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼

 

 

'Orphic' gets a new meaning in Pierre Mazingarbe's short, yet delightfully surreal adventure What Makes Me Take the Train (originally, Ce qui me fait prendre le train). Orpheus is transformed into a woman (portrayed by Noémie Rosenblatt), whereby a silver screen becomes a portal to the Underworld or rather to the train wagon operated by Charon.

After a brief encounter with Cerberus (in the first of a few stop-motion sequences) and the crossing of the Styx river, Orpheus is greeted by two of her lovers (or Eurydice suffering DID), Sophie (Priscilla Bescond) and Sacha (Grégoire Baujat), 'whom the snake had taken away' from her. Since she is not allowed to bring both of them back and does not want to choose between them, they decide to compete for her attention. At one point, they engage in the game of carrot-rabbit which is similar to tennis, but has a rabbit and a bunch of carrots involved (well, duh!), and later, they opt for 'Pétanque Astronomique' which requires the Milky Way to be rebuilt prior to each match.

To reveal anything more would bring us to the spoiler territory, but let's just say that a returning soul has to suffer some wood processing that would probably make Lynch's Log Lady sad... The story often takes pretty irrational (and in addition, mystical and metaphysical) turns, but that should come as no surprise, considering its sources of inspiration are almost certainly the works of Surrealists, pioneers and followers alike. Dream logic and Greek mythology go comfortably hand in hand, as Mazingarbe mesmerizes his viewer via the stark B&W imagery replete with hints of silent era cinema, Raúl Ruiz, Jan Švankmajer, David Lynch, the Quay Brothers and Bertrand Mandico.

And yet, despite of all the aforementioned influences, the oneirisms of What Makes Me Take the Train feel genuinely fresh.

In Short - Films by Julian Radlmaier

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼
 

I thought that it was impossible to be more relentlessly deadpan than Roy Andersson and then I got myself acquainted with Julian Radlmaier's short, yet promising opus which could be labeled as 'Buñuelian blue-collar's neo-surrealism'.

His rigid, North-Korean-society-like aesthetics do require some time to get used to, but once they click with you, you're in for some deadly serious, occasionally laughing-out-loud fun stemming from the decidedly hipsterish satirization of both communism and liberal capitalism, as well as a few other 'isms'.

Moving from the playground of discreet hilarities caused by Vladimir Mayakovski’s ranting ghost (a memorable portrayal by a Georgian poet / multi-media performer, Zurab Rtveliashvili) in A Spectre is Haunting Europe, through the black hole installed at a high-brow exhibition in A Proletarian Winter's Tale and all the way to an apple farm which serves as a starting point for a failed working class revolution (as remembered by a canine specimen) in Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, Radlmaier demonstrates a keen eye for square-format/suprematist compositions and a great sense of absurdist whimsy and self-reflexive irony, proving that birds tend to speak all sorts of utter nonsense and that St. Francis would've sucked as a modern-day laborer and politician.

 A Spectre is Haunting Europe

(Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa, 2013)

 A Proletarian Winter's Tale

(Ein proletarisches Wintermärchen, 2014)

Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog

(Selbstkritik eines buergerlichen Hundes, 2017) 

Phantom Islands (Rouzbeh Rashidi, 2018)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼

Set to the piercing sound of roaring thunder that lights the night sky in the most hypnotic way, the striking opening of Rouzbeh Rashidi's latest - and if you ask this writer, most riveting - offering acts as a portal into the world of altered (cinematic) reality. But, it also stands for a sublime announcement of a mysterious Couple (a committed, boldly uninhibited and highly performative portrayal by Daniel Fawcett and Clara Pais) that is the film's magnetic focal point.

Appearing as if they descended from the sky or another realm for that matter, the twosome wander, disoriented and yet sharing the common (spiritual?) purpose, through the breathtaking landscapes of Irish islands turned into the third, equally alluring protagonist. Who are they and what exactly do they seek? This question is surely not easy to answer and unsurprisingly so, considering the director's previous opus. They could be  benevolent (?) cousins of Jonathan Glazer's alien Female from Under the Skin or some supreme, unidentifiable entities working under human cover in an exile, whether it's forced or self-imposed.

Always walking away (as everybody else does) or strolling far from our sight, they keep us on a distance that is paradoxically closer than any closeness; they pull our thoughts into unexpected directions, lulling us into a meditative state. Even when their gazes are transfixed on us in an attempt to communicate whatever is beyond the inherent truth, we are left with nothing but another riddle. Both mystified and somewhat enlightened, we may resort to stripping them away of their otherness and viewing them as down-to-earth lovers who are just as confused as we are. In that regard, we are offered an assistance from the author himself who, now and then, lifts the veil of the abovementioned reality by blurring the lines between 'behind the scenes' and a finished piece of art. However, the fourth wall phrase does not apply here, for that 'trick' is the integral part of Rashidi's peculiar language.

Also indistinguishable are the boundaries between documentary and (science) fiction, just like it is noted in the director's statement. This illusion is simultaneously dispelled and consolidated by embedding the duo's staged romance into the islanders' everyday and vice versa, under the watchful eye of the invisible forces inhabiting gorgeous and not to mention gorgeously captured locations. As calm as they are maddening, the greenest of meadows, the stoniest of beaches and the thickest of mists destroy the blue, tumultuous love of our heroes and then rebuild it from the ashes, time and again. They have the very same effect on a lyrical (non)narrative which - made porous by black screen punctuations - explores the hidden nature of cinema, inter alia.

What's most astonishing about Phantom Islands are its dreamy visuals and ingenious music score, as well as the pitch-perfect sound design that more than compensate for the lack of dialogue. Virtually each shot is exquisitely composed, each tone being a worthy accompaniment. A masterwork of the (re)modern avant-garde.