November (Rainer Sarnet, 2017)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼(☼) out of 10☼

What is it that has triskelion-like legs attached to an animal skull, moves like a pinwheel or flies like a helicopter, and spontaneously combusts when its master orders it to perform an impossible task, such as making a ladder out of bread? There is no way to guess this riddle (alluding to the first five or so minutes of November), unless you are familiar with the Estonian mythology or, to be more precise, with a magical creature called 'kratt'. And 'kratid' (which is, according to wikipedia, the plural of the aforementioned noun) are often used to steal various goods, from jewelery to livestock, for their owners - the grimy peasants who made a Faustian deal for their bizarre DIY servants to live.

In Rainer Sarnet's latest offering that's based on Andrus Kivirähk's novel Old Barney aka November, and blends a romantic fairy tale with a weird farce laced with dark and twisted humor, kratid are (ab)used as much as religion, superstition and witchcraft to get through the snowy (and not to mention muddy) days in a 19^th century village transformed into a medieval shithole by a creepy German feudal baron (Dieter Laser who brings some unforgettable grimaces to his part). Amidst the tooth-and-nail struggle for survival which is made even more difficult by the plague (embodied by a young shapeshifting woman), the dead rise from their graves to wine and dine with the living members of their families, and to cleanse themselves in a sauna. When love or rather love triangle is born in such a milieu, dirty games do not end - on the contrary, what is supposed to be the purest feeling is stained by sneaky lies and life-threatening charms.

A sweet girl promised to a loathsome neighbor, Liina (inexperienced, yet talented actress Rea Lest), falls for a local don Juan (Jörgen Liik, excellent) whose heart gets stolen by a baron's beautiful somnambulist daughter (first-timer Jette Loona Hermanis) who doesn't seem like she'll be opening her eyes for the beau any time soon, so it's pretty clear they are doomed from the get-go. Although their unfulfilled romance is the centerpiece of the authentic and highly idiosyncratic magic realist narrative, Sarnet indulges in averting the viewer's attention via all sorts of oddities, metaphors and freaky subplots replete with unscrupulous, toothless characters mostly played by non-professionals. Add to that a talking snowman and one of the looniest big screen incarnations of the Devil (kudos to Jaan Tooming), and you got yourself an off-kilter and exotic rural gothic.

The helmer's skillful 'trickery' informed by folk tradition works wonders for anyone who's always in for a bold, unique and somewhat challenging cinematic experience which in this case is further heightened by Mart Taniel's gorgeous cinematography and Jacaszek's ethereal, atmospheric score. The inspired black and white visuals betray a myriad of possible influences, from the classic likes of The Virgin Spring, Andrei Rublev and Marketa Lazarová to the contemporary works of Veiko Õunpuu (The Temptation of St. Tony, also shot by Taniel), Pablo Berger (Snow White), Aleksey German (Hard to be a God) and Paweł Pawlikowski (Ida), impelling you to occasionally pause and admire the astonishing beauty of a frozen frame. Perfectly in line with the wintry, sublimely gloomy eye-candy are evocative instrumentals, haunting vocalizations and subtly ominous snarls of electric guitar which, in a way, displace November from its archaic setting and give it a sense of timelessness.

... to Devour Narcissus

To suppress the memories of fiery red,

wait till the Moon shines upon the bed.

Break the rule of reliving faux divinity

or stagger amongst the ruins of infinity.

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The Autonomous SelfPortrait

Who would even see this three times three

in the licentious pot of hot headlessness?

Who would even care to breathe to be

a vague shape of illuminated calm?

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The Kingdom of Shadows at Vimeo on Demand

Daniel Fawcett and Clara Pais's brilliant arthouse fantasy The Kingdom of Shadows which was the no. 1 entry on my Best of 2017 - ]Cinema Obscura[ Edition list is available for $5 rent at Vimeo on Demand. You can read my review HERE. 

I also had more words of appraisal (the excerpt below) for the 5th issue of the directorial duo's magazine Film Panic which you can order from THIS PAGE.

"... Ruled by the phantoms of Raúl Ruiz and Pina Bausch as King and Queen, with the spirits of Derek Jarman and Sergei Parajanov as Grand Dukes, this transcendental realm rests in the hands of its deities, Daniel and Clara..."

A Lustful Angel Falling into Grace

“I never asked for your divine nightmare, yet you shoved it down my throat. At first, it was pretty sour, but later it got sweeter... almost like a cocooned reverie. And I was enjoying it, until it suddenly lost its taste. My mouth went dry and my eyes burst into tears for no apparent reason. Or maybe it was because of the light? Then, I heard the voice who kept calling me ‘sir’...”

“Sir? Sir? Sir... Sir! Wake up, please! This is not your birth certificate, this is your atheist attest.”

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Dailies from Dumpland (Michael Woods, 2018)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼

 

A cinematic equivalent of a jazzy trip-hop song featuring some bold improvisations, Dailies from Dumpland paints, in wide, nervy strokes, a different (upside-down / unglamorized / paranoia-fuelled) portrait of America; it blurs (if not completely erasing) the boundaries between fiction and documentary / subjectivity and objectivity / suppressed dreams and defective realities; it amalgamates edgy anti-Trump satire with its creator’s raw poetics and anti-commercial sensibilities, and it wonderfully transposes information overload of the modern era into the associative, aggressively kaleidoscopic, stream of (troubled) conscious imagery of often lurid colors and dense textures emerging from bizarre superimpositions that deeply burn themselves into the viewer’s mind.

(The review is based on the rough cut of the film made available by the author himself for a limited time.)

A Solar Dream (Patrick Bokanowski, 2016)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼

At his most abstract and unrestrained, the acclaimed French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski assumes the role of a mad alchemist and presents us with an almost ineffable oneiric trip which appears as an experimental alien broadcast on human life, cosmic phenomena and performance art, inter alia. Decidedly incoherent and delightfully chaotic, his rampant, sumptuous phantasmagoria forcefully breaks all the windows of your mind and opens it to new, vastly unexplored possibilities.

Featuring at its core an epic, no-holds-barred battle between light and darkness, intense colors and metamorphic shapes, A Solar Dream (Un rêve solaire) attacks you with a barrage of incessantly moving images or rather, superimpositions of hypnotic quality, and alters your reality in real-time. Replete with multifarious textures, it fills your screen with dancing shadows, hallucinatory supernovas, sparkling masses of water, sun rays breaking through the branches and smoke turning into liquid before the actors in a theatre play dissolve into an amorphous matter. Oh, and let's not forget the spectacular fireworks, animated sequences and handmade interventions on the film stock.

As you're consumed by the rapturous visuals which form the first of the two highly unconventional narrative threads, the ambient musical score by the author's wife and frequent collaborator Michèle Bokanowski tells the other, both counterpart and counterpoint 'story'. Approximately at the 30minute mark, she seamlessly blends in some tribal drum beats, evoking primordial spirits and simultaneously emphasizing the otherness of her husband's inspired, effervescent, impressionistic and occasionally self-reflexive visions.

In spite of being obscure content-wise, A Solar Dream is a clear and strong proof that cinema is indeed a young medium and open to 'more exploration and more risk', as Daniel Fawcett and Clara Pais put it in their Quest for the Cine-Rebis manifesto.