redlog

Diana Ringo's film is alternately breathtakingly beautiful and scorchingly raw. It is an apocalyptic tone poem full of lyricism and savage emotion, a requiem of sorts for a lost planet and lost love. Anatoly Bely delivers a searing and riveting performance through a series of monologues at different emotional temperatures, at times sardonic, outraged, resigned, and full of regret. His monologues are punctuated by flashbacks, montages of archival footage depicting devastation and destruction. They appear, however, in counterpoint to his visions, containing images of astonishing natural beauty, including those of his lost love, played by Ringo, whose final image, swathed head to toe in dark fur, silhouetted in a snowy landscape, is as haunting as the fabled Snow Queen of Russian legend itself. The film's score, composed by Ringo, is exquisite. It doesn't merely move the story along; it is its emotional nervous system and creates, and is therefore integral to, the film's atmosphere, mood, temperature, and registers of pathos. Part nightmare and part dream, wherein the latter is both the indictment of the former and its redemption.

A stunning film. The almost mask-like personae of the various odalisques, whose impassivity contrast so starkly with the worn and worried man through whose dreams they drift, is arresting. A very compelling film, disturbing, at times, and unnerving, and full of magical moments and a sense of mystery that makes film the stuff of dreams, good and bad, that it is.

Zany and rollicking good fun, darkly humorous and lighthearted at the same time, suffused with a human warmth that makes you laugh with and feel for the characters, even the bad guys, with a wonderful musical interlude that will make you want to jump up and jig or river dance.