La femme qui se poudre

Avant garde cinema is something I can easily get into. Most people cannot really say that and have it not be...lying, but I can. And this film only further proves it. Right away, I am swept into this dark fantasy world of strange masked figures and eerie shadowlike figures of darkness. Admittedly, my visit to this faraway fantasyland does have its tedious bits, despite only being fifteen minutes in length, but by the end I have been legitimately surprised, frightened, and, simply put, impressed. The world crafted here is very much akin to the works of David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Jan Svankmajer, The Brothers Quay, and so on, I can make comparisons all day but that kind of ignores this films standalone merits, which there are a lot of. It is a dark and gloomy near masterpiece of harsh grainy experimental horror that uses so many strange techniques and shoves onto the screen so many surreal visuals that it simply is just something that's right up my alley. And it genuinely creeped me out...quite a bit. The butterflies in my stomach started fluttering at some point. The background score...the images...images that likely make perfect logical sense in whatever world in which the short takes place, but are only vaguely comprehensible in any way from the P.O.V. of us onlookers, the film forces you to feel an extreme detachment to its setting while also establishing its setting in an extraordinarily intimate way. The environment is what this film relies on, the atmosphere is heavier than almost any other aspect here. It is slow and scary and potentially sickening, and it is not for everybody, but for those it's "for"...it's a hidden gem for sure.

I said once that David Lynch had nightmares and then sat down and wrote a script. This film seems to have grown out of a nightmare. A group of disfigured characters seem ready to go someplace. But first one of them must use makeup. Of course, they are so incredibly ugly, it is of little use or effect. Then comes the trek across a wasteland, past a sort of scarecrow. Where are they going and what do they hope to do. The music is haunting and abrasive. The visuals are dark and grainy and miss any sort of focus. This director seems set on letting us squint at the screen to try to figure things out. I've seen three of these films and each seems to have the idea that a character or characters must get someplace with sort of Sisyphyan results.

This is a remarkable little film - a true hidden gem of the avant-garde - haunting, grotesque and beautiful.

The shallow depth of field, the animation, the lens distortion and other optical effects, all make for a wonderfully original cinematic experience.

The bizarre masks and the absurd ritualistic behavior are like a re-enactment of some lost primordial ceremony.

The eerie soundtrack is equally brilliant and captures the mood perfectly.

Filmmakers like Lynch (and subsequently Maddin and Merhige and so forth) have definitely taken a page out of Bokanowski's book.