Dionysos

If justice is blind, truth can be mute: fortunately, neither the director nor the cameraman were blind, as the camera shots dazzle with their restrained purism of Indian light and darkness, like the purism of the young lawyer's idealism in the face of the excesses of power. While the mute faces - the dogs of the lower castes and the slow pacing of the film create the illusion of some sort of Indian Kafkaesque world, where the abstraction of the "missing resolution of the world" and the invisibility of power prepared the viewer for another generalizing experience (which they would quickly forget after the screening), the director is not afraid to masterfully cut to the quick and reveal the lament of wounded flesh behind the mask of silence and restrained aestheticism: the mask falls, and it is Shelley's "Masque of Anarchy," shouting in the best Indian English, "I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!"

The relative autonomy of historical times embodied in the form of film: on one side, the already classic genre of East European allegorical retrospection drawing metaphysical authority from 19th-century symbols, in which nations were born: yet others, not the once occupied small but proud nationalisms – naturally, the then-still non-autonomous Soviet republics in the 1960s to 1980s had to fight their cultural battle with a one-century delay, thanks to which these films enjoy a unique sense of poetics, with which they can separate any historical or visual motif and make it a privileged nodal point Allegory: here, for example, the mesmerizing shot of an open holy book of the nation leafed through by wind illuminated by divine light of the Georgian homeland… It's potent, Rekhviashvili is ingenious, but it would be slightly stale if the director had not remembered that he is already a hundred years ahead: in the era after all the new waves and after Kafka, Rekhviashvili ingeniously creates tension between the 19th century and the 20th century using all subtle but significantly jumpy cuts, cross-cutting or discreet estrangements (narrative within narrative). It is precisely this internal tension that drives the main character to a self-denying absurd final gesture, as well as the film towards its inherently programmed self-destruction.

Subtly experimental, notably reductionist, especially in the use of relatively uniquely grasped temporal ellipses continuously hidden within sharp, seemingly conventional cuts: the editing thus beneath its apparent traditional shell conceals more betrayal than the capricious characters of the narrative. On the other hand, it divulges nothing more than the mystery of its temporal contraction to the viewer, leaving them with a slightly frustrating sensation after viewing the film, that it could have harbored a greater potential than what's realized here: in vain, we anticipate the emergence of a self-contained poetic surreality akin to Jakubisko's Birds, Orphans and Fools (1969) from the stylized microcosm hints, or that the classical relational triad will unfold into deeper and more luxuriant analogies and hyperboles, as with the contemporary master of this genre, Marco Ferreri. Nonetheless, the film offers skillful artistic cinematography, albeit brought down by (perhaps ironically intended) a kitschy, sweet soundtrack, soaking this film in the worst of the 60s inversely to how the camera strives to approach the better aspects...

When the surrealism of the Film becomes indistinguishable from the miraculous nature of Scripture, actors wandering through locations reminiscent of De Chirico's nocturnes may encounter biblical doubles of themselves. Just as a religious film encounters its own double in a mix of Pilate-style poliziotteschi, at times reaching Felliniesque baroque excess, and naturally, the Pasoliniesque moment in the story of Jesus as "the greatest human story." After all, the rather intricate screenplay will please even an atheist, me personally more so than the otherwise much more famous, stylistically purer, and "more metaphysical" mentioned Gospel according to my favorite Marxist, Pasolini, who paradoxically approached the "updating" of the New Testament story much more conservatively than this film, which is unafraid to mix genres and timelines in a much more open synthesis.

A parable of the functioning of the world, reflected in the human consciousness, which is unable to accept the essential absurdity and injustice of the world other than by fictionalizing the unbearable reality: a fiction that paradoxically draws its images from the depths of its unconscious, from the depths where fairy tales, like those of Cocteau, become the embodiment of the principle that reality has the structure of fiction. While the fiction of the powerful of this world, kings and doctors, can pass for reality following Voltaire's saying that "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets," because then medals, orders, and medical diplomas are handed out - while for the lonely individual, prison, a madhouse, or as here both at once await. The imprisoned mind then begins to create its own world for defense against the world, which can only reflect what it has experienced: insults and absurdity will catch up with us everywhere. The film may not reach the surreal coloring of Case for a Rookie Hangman, but not only does it remind them of the absurdity of their common fairy-tale rotten kingdom (and also the physical resemblance of the actors in the leading roles), but above all by this approach, when an unfree society must give birth to a parable of itself and live only through these parables in order to survive. The film The Matrix is ​​only a commercial derivative of this idea. The pace of the beginning will please mainly with the brilliant scenography and film architecture, which elevate the otherwise slightly sluggish pace of the film.

Although the Kafkaesque-existential central motif known from Blow-Up may evoke the appearance of the depth of human existence, drowned four meters from the beach, this film is rather a sharp Ionesco-like parallel, which with its light-footed absurdity much better captures the tragicomic nature of modern Europe, which has rid itself of the shackles of dictatorships to dissolve in the sea of ​​advertising, virtual, political-media simulacra. It is crucial that the film was made in 1974, the year when Greece rid itself of the right-wing military dictatorship - this film is not a pathetic lament over the remnants of the past, but from the first minute of the new era, it does not hesitate to attack the new social regime, where there are no clearly defined enemies, where the hostile "power" (whoever it may be!) no longer needs to steal the object tangible as in Blow-Up because a disc with recorded material of a person's disappearance is worthless in itself: the only important thing is its context, manipulation of public opinion, which shapes reality. It is fascinating that such an "artistic comedy" was created in 1974, which does not hesitate to attack the living without any sentiment. The state and the police as a department of the advertising company Helas Ltd. ("Greece Inc."), whose privatized share was received by every citizen in the coupon privatization...

The ship's siren reminiscent of one from a stereotype factory and the roar of a horn announcing the everyday private apocalypse evokes a paradoxical feeling of stagnant harbor water, with the ship stuck in place and yet inevitably drifting towards its end. The farewell balances on the border between life and death in the anxious timelessness of a black and white camera, when the viewer, as tense as the main character, awaits the gust of wind that would finally move the ship aground - in any direction. This perhaps slightly worn-out theme, but always relevant, is elevated by superb direction, especially by the beautiful cinematography.

The circular structure of the film, which in its second half mirrors the first one in the form of developing variations, inherent to the original arrangement, not only reminds one of Robbe-Grillet's games with Deleuzian incompossible worlds but also ideally fits the actual theme: what if a Japanese Aryan from the Far East could repeat his own life in a different form, as a member of a subordinate Korean ethnicity? The tragicomic nature of this film stems from this circularity, which only refers to the cycle of human history: the compulsive repetition of the superiority of some over others. Nagisa Ōshima's experimental sandbox, which incidentally in the film diegetically emerges from the beach, draws its strength precisely from the subversive self-contradiction, in which nothing can happen to anyone, because they are just a puppet/character in the cycle of the film reel, that can be revived at will, and the fact that from this sandbox a person quickly steps into the real world just as the monkey (a racist figure par excellence) ends after drunkenness: the end of the film merges with the bullet to the head, after which nothing follows.

Sartre's cliché that hell is other people is fully valid - hell is indeed not a place, just as death has no topos: it is in music, words, looks, and the objective of the camera. And death is in the soul instead of the "sun in the soul," the sun of beauty, the Brazilian sun, the sun of the Tropic of Capricorn, the state of Minas Gerais. There is something mythological about the theme, in which a family of decaying former aristocracy or high bourgeoisie closes itself in its isolated, nostalgically wallpapered Petri dish and is observed from the outside with an artistic microscope, just as it is threatened from the outside by the draft of modernity. The biggest contribution of this film lies in two things: firstly, this draft does not represent any simplified agitational symbol, but a character equally hysterical and in its defiant energy almost equally feeble-minded, which means that senseless conjectures, accusations, jealousies, envies, illusions, and chimeras do not sound out, as if there were a simple way out in the right direction. Therefore, secondly, the film is at its strongest when it leaves that external appearance and dives inside its Petri dish - death as a depth permeates the whole mise-en-scène, framing, and a dramatically sweet neo-romantic musical underscore.

Chess with good with evil and light with darkness or until the painterly twilight of a unique film noir bathed in the darkness of the Latin American sun. Which of the pawns is good and which is bad is structurally blurred, and the contrastingly refined black and white camera gives no more clues than a story based on ignorance: there remains the joy of the process, eternal preparation for an invasion, and eternal repetition of the struggle - a children's game of cops and robbers, Indians and cowboys, Germans and partisans, when roles are redistributed after the death of all players and a new round begins - tough men succumbing to their childish pleasures (movie theater, guns, seduction, alcohol, sentimental sense of duty) at the expense of the principle of reality. White stripes at the dances of Russo-Soviet invasions, white stripes on the US flag during invasions of Grenada, Panama, Iraq... But even the blacks are not without guilt, guilt in this film cannot be established: it's not about people, it's about the city; the city as a mere playing field, a chessboard on the table of the parallel army general staff, which fights its battles regardless of the real world beyond the touchlines of children's battles: outside the battlefield, where the standard audience moves, and therefore it is the saddest that this film, which was almost destroyed by the Argentine right-wing pro-American bloody junta, is destroyed for today by the lack of interest of the consumer audience.