Dharma Guns (La succession Starkov)

Delicious experimental brain teaser from Underground icon FJ Ossang who turned 64 last week. The film tells a sort of cathartic odyssey, a re-reading of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice also a Dantesque descent into the underworld. It is a journey into the world of the dead in which the hero (played by Guy McKnight lead singer of Brighton-based rock band The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster ), subject to the removal of his life, discovers that it is the result of a genetic experiment. Ossang favors black and white images and a careful use of classical framing and iris opening and framing techniques like directors of German expressionism and silent cinema. He blends his universe between dark romanticism and post-apocalyptic cyberpunk with refined reveries of a Jean Cocteau, J. Frankenheimer, Carol Reed and Peter Tscherkassky. The story is interesting, but the claustrophobic and dense-like atmosphere of the film responds perfectly to building the plot. In the parallel universe Ossang plays it well by adding more dimension to his character who is in comatose state suspended between life and death on an operating table. In the last section, Ossang puts all the pieces together and it still leaves room for interpretation. You could say that everything fits a little too perfectly. Little is left to the imagination, and everything is neatly rounded off. A bleak Gem by Ossang.

This film opens with a beautiful scene: a speedboat, steered by a woman, races at high speed over the water. Behind it a water-skier, who suddenly crashes. The man wakes from a coma to discover that genealogists are looking for an individual whose identity matches his.

The fable: a young man - poet, scriptwriter and warrior - dies. How do you reconstruct the images in his brain? What do we see in our moment of death? Can the spirit understand the causes of death and clear a path for itself to another life? In what kind of form manifest these final images? Will they dazzle? A feast of lights? An invasion? As memories, hypotheses, assumptions? The magisterial expressiveness of Dharma Guns allows you to experience the impulses of optical nerves and synapses. F.J. Ossang has grafted the film onto the central nervous system, the very place where mental images are born. 'My eyes have drunk,' one hears in this worthy treatment of Antonin Artaud's expectations of cinema. Dharma Guns is constantly airborne, buzzing, pushing its way towards the isle of the dead. A masterpiece that slowly moves before our eyes, in the staggering slow-motion of certainty, into the company of Murnau's Nosferatu and Dreyer's Vampyr.