Where shall I start?
This movie by Alexei Guerman is so unique that it's difficult to know where to begin with. The plot: on a foreign planet, people still live in the middle age and the leaders have managed to shatter any attempt at the appearance of a Renaissance. Explorers from the earth are sent to watch and investigate this world. Of course Guerman tells us about our world and his (a decaying USSR and a newly-born maffia ridden Russia) and the observation is irrevocable.
Have you ever felt a movie physically? Not watched it, felt it, really, like say you want to shake your hair after they've caught the rain. A movie like a thick forest through which you have to dig every step. A movie which watches you as much as you watch it, where actors regularly address the camera, a maelström of confusion.
It's a black and white world, a world of snow and cold. The pictures are genuinely fantastic and we move around and inside middle-age paintings from Brueghel to Bosch.
Sensations really matter as much as the story itself that we often fail to grasp. It's not a real problem since the weirdness that the movie conveys is worth experimenting. Guerman aims at unsettling us with uneasiness. We wander endlessly in an atmosphere of blood, sweat, excrement, spit, snod, sperm and the first ground is often «barred» by a series of hanging obstacles, strange tools and instruments, smoke, pieces of clothing, hanged corpses. Cold, fog and snow cover this world of misery and suffering where people are puppets in a grotesque and crual show.
You have NEVER seen anything like this!
Resist the temptation of going away and take the Guerman tour, which, as the film unfolds, becomes mesmerizing.
Something you'll NEVER forget.
