Finisterrae

This is a GREAT film. If you love strange and unusual films, Finisterrae is for you. We get to walk and ride along with two ghosts (with sheets and all) as they wander through the nether-regions looking for a way back to the living. One ghost seems to be enjoying himself. The other is none-to-pleased with the afterlife.

I won't spoil anything, but here is a gem. One ghost is given a rock as a gift by a different, more naked, ghost. Turns out the rock is "pleasure" and if you or a ghost or a creature from the underworld hold it up to your ear, you'll hear the sea-shelly goodness that is "pleasure." Bravo!

Also, if you or your partner aren't really in to experimental films, this one is not at all hard to stay with. There are multiple levels of meaning to be sure, but, it's basically a "road movie" set in Catholic Limbo. What happens on the ghosts' journey is certainly strange, but it's easy to sink your teeth into the basic plot. Yes, there actually is a plot. Don't try to digest it all at once, just sit back and go for a ghost ride.

This IS fabulous experimental cinema. I do hope it takes home a prize.

NOTE: If you're annoyed with the way HD has caused SD TV audio to be slightly out-of-sync, this film will please you. Senor Caballero has found the solution...no mouths! Bravo!

Disclaimer: While I enjoy many so-called "arthouse" films or "festival" films, I have no previous experience with "experimental" films. What is the purpose of the "experiment"? To throw in things and see if people love them? To propose a new aesthetic? How do you evaluate your experiment?

Anyway, back to our film. The IMDb synopsis is quite complete: two Russian speaking ghosts, draped in white sheets with two openings for the eyes, want to go back to life. Through some supernatural communication they find out that they have to travel to Santiago de Compostela for that purpose. I won't go into the details, they do just that: go to Santiago. On the way they encounter all kind of supernatural or absurd situations that, in my opinion, cannot be interpreted in any way and they serve just as a pretext for quirkiness. Trees with ears that produce sounds, a hole in a tree through which one of the ghosts sees some 80s images/graphics, a guy puking on some pie. Horse puppets burn, things appear from nothing, hocus-pocus-like, from petards and smoke, one of the ghosts balances a huge censer, all kind of such images.

The end is no better, I would not call it cathartic or that it solves some tension in the meager plot.

It could be the "Chien andalou" of our times. But at least Buñuel and Dalì stated that they made the film purposely such that it could not be interpreted in any way, that nothing in the film symbolises anything. This work however looks way immature, as if it were the ideas of overexcited 15 year old boys that are told to make a film. Most of it is ridiculous and it is extremely tedious to watch it through. I remember a scene that is shot upside down and I thought "oh no, 'look at me, how clever I am, how original I am'".

Some commended the camera work. As of the film, I do not have much positive to say about it either. In most takes, the camera is completely still, no moves, no zooms in, no zooms out, the only things that move in the frame are the ghosts and the vegetation/waves/fires/smoke.

I have a confession to make: I did not understand ANY part of this film. I would have left half way, were it not that the venue was fully booked, and I would have stepped on many toes to get out. Moreover, I'm willing to accept that my horizon needs broadening. In the hope that some insight would fall on me later on, I stayed. And I tried to understand what the makers were trying to get across. It works every now and then, but not this time.

The landscapes were great, camera work well done, but all the rest was incomprehensible. For instance, what was the idea behind the fact that the two ghosts had a horse (only one!) some of the time, one wheelchair at other moments, and an artificial horse at still other moments. The latter was burnt, by the way, maybe serving a useful purpose, but I did not get it. In spite of travelling without any luggage, I saw a toolbox appear at some moments, and a pan at another time. A hidden meaning below all this??

The final scene ended with some J S Bach (from cantata: Gottes Zeit etcetera), but that did not rescue the film for me.

A very original touch was the reading (!) of the credits at the end.

This movie isn't any good at all. The only reason I'm reviewing it at all is that the IMDb rating is suspiciously high for such an amateurish piece of work - I bet there are quite a few friends and family of the crew who've been in here giving it a favorable rating. Anyway, this movie comes off as being directed by a bunch of first year students who've grown up on annoying The Lord of The Rings-style fantasy and have recently been introduced to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. They try to ape some Tarkovsky-style cinematography, and they've picked some quite atmospheric locations. But sorry - it results in no cinematographic magic. There are some attempts at no-budget special effects. "Look! We can do backwards shots! And now we're turning the camera upside down!" I'm not giving this a good kicking because it's an 'experimental' movie and I don't know anything about slow pretentious art movies. I'm fairly well versed in Tarkovsky, Angeloupolus, Ozu etc. They're good. This movie is not. The music is nice enough - Nico, Suicide, Anton Webern etc, artists who do 'dark and pretentious' much better than the people who made this movie.