seressandor

Poor Andrei Tarkovski....

The story is about a middle-aged man, probably a photographer from a big city, who arrives to a lone countryside, into a world of the struggling small farms, where the locals are poor_loser_caricatures, who are not_so_helpful, primitive, but sometimes secretive and almost always rude for the stranger and play disgusting and violent games among them. Our man arrives to a land, when the time seems to be frozen and the opportunity of the return (escape maybe) is offered very soon to him, even before the opening titles run down. The suspense starts, but will fade away to nowhere with the sympathy of the audience.

The chopped and mixed episodes are repeated with small alterations, and big confusion (see Pulp Fiction or Mulholland Drive), but the movie runs with a very slow pace and focusing a lot on the treasures of the nature (tiny hills, gentle slopes, leafy trees, a beautiful and mysterious creek) and sleazy, dirty indoors with worn-out countrymen waiting for the hopeless redemption (see Stalker).

The movie 'Másnap' is a missed opportunity for a good and tasty film. The outdoor shots are delightful for the fans of the original and perfect cinematography, but the indoors are dull and sometimes even stupid. The feeling of a timeless, unforgiving world with multiple spaces and times for one act is defined deliberately and on a fine way, but for nothing as the following episodes are dull and annoying.

The film borrows some pictures from Tarkovski (Solaris, Stalker), Kurosawa (Rashomon), Hitchcock basics and even from Kobayashi's Kwaidan, but there is no connection, no purpose for them.

The scene follows the murder, when the stone is thrown to the creek and we see the water to flow and the water-plants bending, is a direct copy from Andrei Tarkovski and is very painful near to the end of the struggling and tiring, time-wasting film. The world of Másnap has nothing common with the great Tarkovski movies, and no real connection to Hitchcock or Kurosawa...

The script is divided for parts as 'The Sky', 'The Dust', 'The Wind' and 'The Road' but it makes no difference: it is a flop with a lot of stolen motifs from the classics with no real dialog, no real story, no coherence.

The slow pace, strange faces and dialogs are just like in a bad dream, but a dream is not as long as this disaster.

So the result is about 50 % - it should have been completed, mainly with the scissors...