Le visiteur du musée

Made in 1989, a few years after Dead Man's Letter, this film contains some similarities: a post-apocalyptic world where civilisation has collapsed, in this case because of ecological catastrophe. The ecological catastrophe is the result of man's careless treatment and overexploitation of nature. All that remains is a barren landscape (not a tree to be seen), pollution and lots of rubbish.

Like the earlier film, it is shot with a very limited colour gamma, mostly dark reds and blacks. I found it easier to see the point of Dead Man's Letters. The Museum Visitor has several very powerful scenes, but it is harder to se it as a coherent whole.

The film's hero is a "tourist" who travels to see a museum that can only be reached when the seas part. He is one of the few human left who still keep the old attitude and way of thinking. More numerous are some kind of mutants or idiots (most indeed played by people with real disabilities) who live in reservations in some kind of permanent religious exaltation. Normal, intelligent humans are sceptical atheists, and keep the idiots away, inter alia by lighting fires on their windowsills. However, even the normal world has been turned upside down, and thus for example the new fashion dictates that men wear high heels and tights. An old man at an inn asks the tourist to close his eyes and open the scriptures at random and point at a paragraph. But nobody is able any longer to understand the meaning of the scriptures. The world is too far gone, too close to the end to be able to appeal to any gods.

While trying to reach the museum, the "tourist" undergoes a profound deep transformation and ends up on his own via crucis.

I would hesitate before recommending this very tough, depressing film, except to those who have enjoyed other films by the same director.

Stunning yet overwhelmingly bleak cinematography sets the mood for this post apocalyptic tale. We see a ruined world, from which a seeker emerges- he wants to explore a museum that is normally underwater. In the end we find that we are dealing with a strange yet weirdly appropriate theology, yet our would be prophet or liberator is probably just a madman, mad with a god-induced delirium? Or is it really just that the world has lost its collective mind and the protagonist is merely trying to cope ? It is hard to understand exactly what the director is trying to say in this one,. You get the Tarkovsky vibe throughout but I think this film is more 'dark' than what Mr. T usually made. ( Director Lopushansky studied under the great Mr. T ) The final 25 minutes are some of the most emotionally stirring scenes in film history; however, there does need to be some editing done here and there to trim down the movie a bit, to make it more compact and accessible.

The visuals are amazing, the themes in it are interesting and relevant in many ways. However, this one was a bit too preachy and overstretched for my taste. This film isn't subtle by any means and sometimes even crosses over to the horror genre.

I've seen it once on a festival, at the time it came out, and I was impressed. Would love to see it again, but it doesen't seem to be published in the western Europe.

I don't remember much of it nowdays, but the main idea was that there is a forgotten underwater museum somewhere in the sea!

So the main characters go in search for it. There are a lot of horrific scenes with a great number of real mentally retarded people, and it takes some bravery to watch it, but, at the end the film can be compared to the ones of Tarkovsky.

This movie has some amazing shots. The ending scene of the movie is breathtaking, I can't see how he planned for that - but I know he must have. The same goes for the rest of the movie, what a production! Big crowds of people in one scene, big heaps of junk in the next. The room with the stormy waters outside in one scene, and barren landscape outside later on. I can only imagine the amount of work put into making this movie look like it does.

So that's one thing. I'm having difficulties thinking of other things I liked with the movie. Some of the sequences drag on for way too long without really adding anything to the movie (as far as I can tell). I must admit that I'm not entirely sure what Lopushanskiy is trying to do or say in this movie. I guess it can be seen in light of communism and parts of the communists regimes. The elites being anti religion, and the people treated badly. But the religious aspect of it also brings my mind to Judaism. God's chosen people treated like animals. Maybe I'm being too specific, and he is trying to say something about man in general. But is it a message of hope? Or hopelessness? The movie was not able to hold my interest in the plot, and so I also lose interest in whatever message it is trying to convey.

That said, it's worth watching for the visuals alone, and I'm sure other's will find more in the plot than I did. Maybe it helps knowing more about the context in which the movie was made?