Kurpe

The setting for this German-made film is a desolate town, off the Baltic sea in the former Soviet Union, during the height of the Cold War. A regiment of border guards come upon a woman's shoe that has washed up on the shore and immediately decide that it is evidence of infiltration. Three soldiers are dispatched to search for the owner of the shoe and presumably arrest and interrogate them. As the soldiers make their way about town, the film takes on the tone of a comic Bicycle Thief. It also reminded me visually of some of Jim Jarmusch's films. The shots are mostly very long takes which linger long after any activity has ceased, giving the viewer a sense of place. Particularly moving are tracking shots across a schoolroom and in a meatpacking factory.

Be forewarned, the pacing of this film is deliberate and not plot-driven. The resolution is charming in its own quiet way.

The Shoe is a nice little comic satire on the not too distant past about Cold War Eastern Europe and its paranoid government security system. When a shoe is found on a Latvian beach it is interpreted as a major security breach. Three soldiers and a German Shepard are dispatched to a local village shoe in hand to find the owner and detain her. A rather strange Cinderella story ensues as the clumsy soldiers are ignored and given little assistance or cooperation by the town's populace.

Laila Pakalnina has written and directed a sly and soberly comic little gem of a film with this absurd depiction of the blundering inefficiency and misguided priorities of a totalitarian regime. Visually she manages to create some strong abstract images to give the drab town an interesting look and mystery and her camera movement and positioning allow the film at times to work as a silent. She is equally adept at overt humor (the opening scene of hysteria and over reaction to the shoe's discovery is beautifully choreographed) and subtle nuance in her mocking of Soviet efficiency ( the local postman does more for the town in a day than the entire inept platoon). Without disrupting the film's light tone she also effectively and economically conveys the oppressive nature of the state and the fear it instilled in the populace with a montage of portraits of home dwellers with frozen reactions to the Army's unnanounced intrusions. The soldiers may be bumbling but they represent terror.

On the down side the film moves very slowly in some sequences due to loose editing and there is little in terms of character development with the principals, but this is all trumped by Pakalnina's interesting mise en scene and illustration of the absurd. The Shoe is an odd size but a good fit.

Three young soldiers discover a woman's shoe on a sandy beach and chaos breaks out. Sirens go off, officers appear and hurried orders are shouted out. Welcome to Liepaja, Latvia, 1950. The new frontier. A time of paranoid suspicion, absurd reality and good old fashioned Latvian stoicism.

The story of Laila Pakalninas `Kurpe' (The Shoe) reflects the absurdities of Latvian life in the early days of the Soviet occupation. This was the period in which the sand of Liepaja's coastline was dredged each night by a tractor, like a conscientious golfer would a sand trap, and the following morning checked for fresh footprints. When a pair of border guards discover a woman's shoe in the sand that wasn't there the previous night, it could only mean one thing. A saboteur must have landed. It is the only possible explanation. The commander of the border guards orders them, in classic Soviet fashion, to find the woman to whom the shoe belongs in the most direct manner possible. They are to traverse the city and to see whom the shoe will fit. A bit of Soviet Cochranism `If the Shoe will fit, you must convict.' What ensues is an absurd tale that reflects the absurdities of Soviet life. Pakalnina's direction and cinematography perfectly complements the realities of the time. The film is an `art' film and as such might not appeal to those who are used to more traditional forms. There is very little dialogue and the plot assumes that the viewer understands the backstory. The shot selections often will often have the characters shot in silouethes or as reflections. The cinematography is in high contrast black and white. However, for what it tries to be it is a nearly perfect film. The pacing and the style perfectly capture the helplessness and pragmatism of Soviet Latvian life. The ability of people to persevere with stoic resignation, all the while never quite submitting to their fate. Pakalnina's background is in experimental and documentary films and it shows in the best possible way in this film. `Kurpe' resists the temptation to judge the period, but presents it in a straightforward manner allowing the audience to reach their own conclusions. Often films like this tend to be a bit heavy, but `Kurpe' never crosses the line. Pakalnina is greatly helped by the actors ability to appear natural. Their understated performances make the film's absurd tone even more poignant. In many ways this film shows how to accomplish a lot with a little. According to Pakalnina, the story and the style were driven by the fact that she could not find the funding for some other projects and in the meantime decided to film a story with what she had available.

There are not many films out there quite like 'The Shoe,' which is so unusual that you should see it at least twice to really savour its 'messages'. Are you watching a wildly funny satire of officialdom, a condemnation of mindless autocracy, or a vivid example of the folly of human existence? I submit that you're watching all that and much more, and it's all achieved in a mere 75 minutes of screen time.

Writer/director Laila Pakalnina's film focuses on a simple, absurd premise -- a woman's shoe is found on a makeshift 'borderline' on a Baltic Sea beach in late-1950s Latvia, at the time a Soviet Socialist Republic under the often brutal control of the Russian Army. The shoe is seen by the grim-faced, fanatically over-reacting Soviet occupiers as a clear sign that their command has been 'infiltrated' by enemy agents.

A hapless trio of soldiers is sent to scour the nearby port town to find the owner of the fugitive shoe. In full bumbling flight worthy at times of the Keystone Kops, they ask woman after woman to try the shoe on; if the shoe fits, so to speak, the woman, presumably, would be deemed guilty of espionage. This Cinderella idea seems insane, but for the bored, under-tasked, isolated, excitable and mountains-from-molehills Soviet Army command in Latvia, the missing shoe is nothing less than a major international crisis.

This film take us on an odd journey that is simultaneously subtly hilarious and deeply disturbing. The black-and-white camera work is so vivid, unusual, and imaginative that we are reminded at times of the stark imagery of Citizen Kane. Characters are regularly seen as silhouettes or shadows; they enter the screen from the left and exit, without any movement from the camera, only to re-enter from the right, repeating a pointless process. The symbolism of this technique quietly underlines not only the lunacy of 'faceless' bureaucracy/officialdom, but the futility of being human: we are always looking for something that isn't there; it's something we do throughout our lives. If we find that 'something,' we merely move on to the next 'something'.

There are no 'stars' in this film, no central characters except, perhaps, for the bumbling soldiers. The ludicrous action (non-action?) on screen is sometimes reminiscent of Jacques Tati or the Georgian director Otar Ioselliani (Monday Morning), who wonderfully demonstrates the pointlessness of human movement and purpose.

This is a deliciously off-kilter work.