pwolfcarius

This picture is OK, but not great, detached, unsentimental, unpsychological and even impersonal, as often these days, mysterious without reason ; Shultes, the main character, is not only solitary and impenetrable, but suffers from amnesia (an easy symbol of the way Russia today forgets itself, I suppose, but making little difference to the picture itself...) ; he lives with his old and sick mother, but they just watch TV together in the evening, not exchanging one single word ; he does a bit of running, a bit of stealing, and he's quite good at picking pockets (maybe the picture tries to be "Bressonian"... but here stealing is not prideful self-assertion, nor anything else... it's just a meaningless way of survival...

The only really great part is when we see actress Cecile Piege, in a little film she shot of herself on her portable camera, making a passionate declaration to an unseen (and to everybody else unknown) man, then singing (or miming ?) a punkish song for him ; and I'd like very much to know what the title of this song is, and who sings it in reality...

Easily the most interesting and beautiful debut film of these last few years, with "Tan de repente" and "Verboden te zuchten" ; explicitly placed under the care of Kierkegaard ("if you hang yourself, you'll regret it, if you don't hang yourself, you'll regret it too"), Nói is as full of humour as it is desperate (with the exception of "love and getting away", Nói doesn't take anything seriously ; he's constantly playing : to avoid being sucked in by that seemingly absurd adult world which takes itself so seriously ; he dreams of escaping to Hawaii, looking at slides with a cheap viewing-box his mother just gave him for his birthday ; in this minimum world, everything is cheap...)… Frightful feelings of isolation and desolation, of being trapped on one hand ; but on the other hand, as absurdly funny (the parish-priest and Nói haggling over the depth of the tomb he has to dig in the cemetery ! and in Danish, Kierkegaard is the word for cemetery...) as it is anguishingly claustrophobic (Nói trapped, this time literally, in his secret cellar after the avalanche -- probably an allegory of his ever-increasing isolation)…

Filmed with Tarkovskian beauty (a permanent blue cast, at once gloomy, serene and unsettling ; blue maybe because it is the exaggeration, the saturation of white, the white of frost, the white of snow), it could be seen as the fateful tale (told more in images than in words) of a village "idiot" (in the Dostoievskian sense), or a "Stalker", as hemmed-in by (rather nice) people as the village is hemmed-in by (desperately beautiful) nature, doomed for absolute aloneness, into which, starting from mere difference and marginality (the "albino" bit), he will gradually "descend" (taking refuge regularly in that cellar being just another allegory of this) ; a journey to the end of the cold… tragic, but perhaps liberating… even if we can't, whatever we do, escape "fate" (the local fortune teller had rightly seen only "death and desolation" in store for Nói)… Starting rather realistically, the film gets more allegorical as it unravels (the avalanche turns out to have killed a mere 10 people : all those Nói had some contact with, and only those) ; in the last but one image, facing us, looking into his viewing-box, Nói looks like a robot, or a spaceman with his helmet on ; as for the very last image (the "real" view of one of the Hawaiian slides he used to look at : a beach of white sand, palm trees, and the gentle waves of a turquoise sea), it will probably be given as many interpretations as there will be viewers ; it proves once more that images, like words, don't have meaning(s) in themselves, but only relatively to the context into which they come inserted : here, the corniest touristic cliché becomes a thing of many meanings, an unfathomable mystery…

Like Aki Kaurismaki's "Match factory girl", in many ways a fairy tale in reverse...