Dionysos

If the well-known cliché that painting is the art of addition and photography is the art of reduction holds true, then this film proves that cinematography is the art of unifying opposites: the layering of unnatural makeup on both female and male faces and thus their symbolic hypocrisy is perfectly supported by a natural yet "artificially" composed, meaningful and essential camera, which, with its zooms, allows the characters' faces to emerge against a reduced, often monochromatic background. In fact, an empty background... The synthesis of a swollen dream of an unrecognized drag queen - who passes dreams off as reality - with a "new wave" intermezzo of a dream of one of the characters, which is entirely shot in detail on an empty background of one's destiny, gradually engulfing all the others. And the viewer. But there is not only pessimism here, as this film seems to be growing and surpassing its background: a small illusory world of the stage of the drag show - a small town and its little people - a small French-speaking province in the flood of the big world. A big world that, however, encloses us in brackets and allows us to glimpse through a truly feminized and bittersweet sympathetic eye into the great little histories of ordinary and less ordinary lives.

The slow birth of civil surrealism or a woman's body as a landscape, in which streams of antidepressants flow as contrasting as the wild landscape of Canada shared by an Indian and a nun at the same time. A subtle counterpoint absorbed throughout the film between prevailing realism and hints of magical realism, which suggests, hints, prepares, and possibly symbolizes through various misplaced objects (rats, parts of figurines, a magician) - the dissected body of a modern human being is composed in the process of perfectionization into an artificial doppelgänger, in the process of indirect proportionality, the inverse product of which is the implosion of the mind and the life of a real person: it is possible to partly agree with the character of the sculptor claiming that the only beauty is in stiffness, immobility (hence death), but at the same time not forgetting that the film itself equals movement and here the movement was captured very aptly: slow movement from healthy to insane, from real to surreal.

A typical Alain Robbe-Grillet game of self-fertilization and self-destruction of the narrative instance of the work, following the pattern of Maurits Cornelis Escher's drawings, supplemented with pervasive uncertainty both in terms of motivation and the characters' identities. In Un bruit qui rend fou ("An insupportable noise" or literally "Noise, which drives one mad"), the noise referring to the game of mahjong serves as an internal duplication of the very principle of constructing this film (and all the author's other films) in the sense of continuous recombination of basic thematic coordinates. However, the traditional theme of doppelganger and schizoid fragmentation of characters is recuperated too much in Robbe-Grillet's terms, almost too much in the style of poetic surrealism, which leads to the impression of a revived fairy tale about the return of ghosts, etc., while the author's greatest historical contribution in his greatest films lies in the fact that he does not create that sense of "magical realism" through content ambiguity, but only through a formal play with montage, sharp cuts, and the autonomy of the sound component... Here we are dealing with more of a magical realism for the masses, and delirious consciousness is not given by a mere linear game with montage and incompatible time, but rather by the delirium of feverish love 'in the time of cholera' - thanks to which this film is also one of Robbe-Grillet's more accessible films.

Film, revolution, sex: art, equations of not just one Japanese art film of the late 60s and early 70s, especially from the legendary production workshop "Art Theater Guild", which is also behind this film, although here the equation is too balanced between the existential aesthetic pole on one side (à la Yoshida or the previous masterpiece Death by Hanging) and the sexually screaming repetitive storyline on the other side, which recalled the good and bad of Koji Wakamatsu. It's as if the split mind of the main character reflected a certain split in the author's ability to balance the urgency and valence of individual motifs: if Oshima wanted to double the incomprehensible exaggeration of the intra-diegetic film within the film in relation to its fictional audience by portraying this incomprehensibility by exaggerating the repetitive love scenes with deliriously repeating patterns of the same speeches, then he succeeded. On the other hand, I enjoyed precisely those existential flashes that seemed to shine through the film hidden beneath what was seen, the one that is contained in every film in the world, from capturing the foam of days to the conventional Hollywood art of forgetting and even the most real-political agitation: the "hidden" obvious film of the city, objects, lines, noises, silence, characters before they become social, diegetic, or political characters. The poetry of reality in its deeper surrealist-existential dimension before it becomes an identifiable self from me and its empty doppelgänger in which we live every day, and which always allows us to discover that incomprehensible "deeper" reality in retrospect: when it is always too late because the loop of the true film has already finished when we put it into the projector. There is nothing left but to repeat its circular movement - and to find out that we have wrapped that loop around our necks ourselves.

Esthetic philosopher Boris Groys knew that the utopianism of communism lay in the attempt to replace the power of capital with the power of politics, which is nothing more than words - all power of discourse. This film is precisely the best dream of the performative power of speech: slogans are not templates, but a medium that brings events to life on the screen - it truly requires the viewer's attention to the moments when the characters' speeches generate a new, disjointed narrative sequence, symbolically connecting the jumpy editing with the inevitably unnatural/violent leap from immaterial word to material action. The true meaning of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" lies precisely here, and the Yugoslav hippie communists of the fourth way - the path between capitalism, Soviet state socialism, and Chinese Maoism of cultural revolution - try to find the mythical origin of phrases here, their real embodiment in existing political regimes has (?) profaned them forever. How else than to once again transform phrases into actions - but differently, newly, disjointedly: both in relation to previous attempts and to previous film art. Why couldn't Godard's Week-End become the basis for a new kind of film, just as Lenin's turn of the helm became the basis for a new concept of societies: that capitalism ultimately triumphed and suffocated the bad alongside the good that emerged in the field of real socialism and cinema Marxism, is nothing but a sad legacy of the present, which will make this film incomprehensible to many contemporary viewers. And this is characteristically true for a film that is so ironically critical of the former real socialism (albeit constructively!) that many anti-communists would envy: another example of how the baby is thrown out with the bathwater...

The first "feature-length" (notice that this terminology is a concession to the film industry complex) film of an always politically motivated artist filmmaker - it is clear to everyone that there was no place for such a combination in Hollywood. With the characteristic anticipation of every prophecy fulfilled (since the film historians already know how it turned out), this film anticipates many of its filmmaker's destinies: interest in both global and internal revolution, not losing sight of the human dimension, interest in nonconformist artistic forms, and the necessity of not only spiritual and inspirational emigration to Europe, where Robert Kramer later lived and died... Here, explicit allusions to Antonioni and the fashionable theme of alienation from others condense with the theme of alienating oneself through the loss of political motivation and the dilemma of every revolutionary - to succumb to the death drive through self-destructive complete loyalty to an Idea greater than life and every individual (for humanism, not seeing the person), or to turn to individual people as the embryos of humanity in every human being and reconcile "normal" life with one's own engagement? The slightly sexist personification of these contradictory tendencies, around which the main point of the film is built, traditionally attributes to Woman the role of the "principle of reality" and to Man the death drive, aware that anyone who does not look completely into the depths is just another compromising coward. Verified. However, Kramer did not only make a political essay-agitation in the style of Chris Marker or Cinétracts around 1968, but he also combined it with the aforementioned Antonioni and at times the film also reminds of Rohmer with his fondness for constantly analyzing human relationships and morality through dialogue; or Cassavetes' Faces.

Music as a formal continuity of discontinuous ideas - the decay of civilizations, which, like every hero, need their catastrophe (Achilles would not be without his heel, Napoleon needs St. Helena) to be inscribed in history as such, and therefore, every empire needs its collapse to experience its glory. And as the film femme fatale of the "Phantom of the Opera" - the guide Litvinov, says, not only is it the principle of art: but also the consumption of the strength and identity of those we devour - the extermination of lions, eagles, and opera by today is the only way to save them. A somewhat paradoxical finding emphasizes the dynamic tension between sarcastic Kazakh ethnology with surreal sheen - which allows opera singers to perform from the stage in a yurt to the big world of music, just as H. Růžičková from a Czech courtyard once stepped with one foot into Europe - and authentic nobility, when Turkic and Persian carpets on a micro-level perfectly imitating the burgundy boxes of opera houses, the music of giants roars with full force and the purity of tones complements the purity of visuals. Self-ironic not in the form of pop art, but opera art, which pays homage to eternity in the scenery of all-pervasive decay.

Deleuze noticed that Ferreri mastered the "art of evoking original worlds amidst realistic environments..." (…) And "he places strange instincts here, such as the maternal instinct in males in La donna scimmia or the irresistible instinct to blow into a balloon in the film Break up." (Film 1, pp. 156-157) Instinct does not lead anywhere, it does not construct anything, it feeds on itself - it certainly does not construct a plot, a comprehensible arc for the average viewer, weaned on musty narrative forms already drained from their own Babička - which is just as incestuous or perverse as many of Ferreri's films. When a Man tells a Woman that he doesn't want her to be just another Friday to him, he means that he doesn't want their story to be just another conventional narrative of growth, education, upward direction, a civilizational fairy tale of progress, and a bourgeois fairy tale of progress in the storyline: Robinson's island remains uncultivated, the engine of civilization does not start, the end of the film is not pointed, and the course of the action is not heightened. In Ferreri's work, the process of externalizing the primal instinct (or scriptural intention, intelligible metaphor, etc.) merges with the staging of the entire film, which does not need to say anything more because there is nothing more to be found in it. "After all, it was just a dog" will undoubtedly be followed by "after all, it was just a woman" in the next step, and in the end, it was just love, it was just life, it was just a film...

The text of the drama is read for oneself, before any introduction on the stage: it is not the actor who brings the text to life, but the reader - the empty space of the stage is the world. Space itself, text itself. Love itself. And yet, through this formal emptiness, it is given to us - the audience, to its lovers. The content of ourselves comes with a delay, with even greater force, only to then recede like a wave on the Atlantic coast, momentarily giving way to some prefabricated obsessive motifs of the Durassian universe, one of which is precisely the end of love, departure, flowing, and dissolving. Cut, blackness, extreme film emptiness. Silence. And in that moment, the viewer can once again begin their merging with the text and image, like that shot in which the sky, sea, and beach merge into one.

Failure and success of Eastern European cinema combined -  two old ladies torn from the space-time of the bankrupt "Post-Soviet" era and their no less idealized (fake) friend, a tuner of musical instruments from dead times. Their interaction and environment are like a walk through the mustiest, most battered antiquarianism, and their behavior exudes the same fermé as the narrative principle that Muratova took from their long-deteriorated epoch - truly here one can revive, for example, Chekhov or any other embalmed mummy of the classic bourgeois novel of the late 19th century, which has switched places with Lenin. Fortunately, there is another character here who returns (not only) the post-Soviet reality back into the unfolding of history and this film, and that is the hungry, fleeting, valueless yet most vibrant, most authentic character - the femme fatale Renata Litvinova, who personifies another typical Eastern European trait: the extremization of lies to such an absurd extent that truth emerges from it, as this lie can no longer be believed and therefore it is not worth maintaining one's hypocritical mask in front of one's conscience (the famous West, holding on with nails embedded in its self-deception, still has a lot to learn here). That is also where those rare moments lie when the viewer can find flashes of authenticity and novelty of gestures behind the mask of affected embarrassing acting, for which in their absurdity toward the story, no other meaning can be found than that life finally takes a breath here, which needs no other justification than itself: hence the occasional hint of liberating absurdity, which Muratova so masterfully stirs up in other films, of which in this otherwise unsuccessful film, perhaps only another typified Eastern European language remains - shrillness, shriek as a frequent expression of comicality (from the Slavic Balkans through Romania to the Slavic Ural) and everyday reality.