The auteurist theory of cinema revolved around identifying as a film’s true “author” those directors who have a very distinctive personal style. (Never mind that even they are working in a medium that requires a great deal of collaboration, and generally requires such things as “a script.”) As such things go, it is hard to think of a talent more singular than Sergei Parajanov, whose birth centennial is being celebrated with a series at BAMPFA in Berkeley, November 1-22. (It also encompasses a live symposium on his legacy, featuring lectures and discussion from five experts on the subject, this Sat/2 afternoon.)
There had been nothing like his films beforehand, and anything resembling them afterward owed him a clear debt of influence. They were eccentric, ethnic, folkloric, ritualistic, often feeling more akin to old storytelling forms like tapestry or religious iconology in their striking tableaux, which lent historical or mythological ideas a flavor somewhere between the fetishistic and fantastical.
His work was of the Soviet era. It was encouraged to a degree by officials seeking to acknowledge regional cultures within the U.S.S.R. without inciting any of the separatist notions that would eventually dissolve that patchwork Eurasian construct. But as far from realism or overt political content as his films seemed to most lay viewers, they nonetheless often struck those same authorities as ideologically subversive.
His bisexuality provided another convenient excuse for imprisonment as well as professional obstacles, so that he only completed four features as a mature artist, over a quarter-century’s course. After achieving international fame, much of his career was spent as a dissenter whose projects got interfered with or blocked, straits protested by colleagues, intellectuals, and tastemakers around the world.
1965’s Ukrainian doomed period love story Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors was greeted as if its filmmaker had come out of nowhere, but in fact Parajanov had been making documentaries, shorts, and narrative features for over a decade prior. He later considered that early work “garbage,” however. Little of it foreshadows the extraordinary leap Shadows (which plays Fri/15) would represent. Its mystic elevation of a Romeo & Juliet-like doomed period love story in the Carpathians felt like a song passed down through untold generations, then miraculously transformed into dazzling visual form. Its specificity of culture helped foster some confusion about the director, who was born to Armenian-heritage parents in Georgia, then moved to the Ukraine (after studying in Moscow)—he himself said “I have three motherlands.”
The waves Shadows made abroad were the kind Soviet minders felt wary of, as it fell outside their control and reflected an artistic personality whose very originality suggested resistance. Moving to an Armenian subject, the 1969 film eventually called The Color of Pomegranates (playing this Fri/1 and Sun/10) was even more bold and abstract in its treatment of 18th-century poet Sayat-Nova’s life. It was dogged by all kinds of official interference, some prints even censoring the mention of the historical subject’s name. These two films were almost immediately regarded as world classics, and remain considered by many as the greatest features of their respective nations.
So, naturally, Parajanov wasn’t permitted to make another movie for over 15 years, a long stretch in the celluloid gulag unbroken until 1985’s The Legend of the Suram Fortress (Sun/17). That Georgian folk tale was a full return to form, as was the Azerbaijani-language Ashik Kerib (Fri/22), a personal favorite, in 1988. He was working on a never-finished second Armenian epic when he died two years later at age 66, his health long damaged by stints in prison and a hard labor camp. Even amidst those incarcerations, he had managed to create art in a wide range of media (small sculptures, collages, drawings etc.), though it’s unlikely the West will ever get to see what few of those objects have survived.
Fortunately, the films are here to stay, many now being shown in recent digital restorations. Also included in the BAMPFA series is Patrick Cazals’ 2003 documentary Sergei Parajanov: The Rebel (Sun/3) and several shorts by and about its subject. For full info on the “Centennial Celebration” schedule, go here.
As an artist, Parajanov had little interest in modernity, or city life in general. Bucolic settings likewise beckon in other arrivals this weekend—though of course being closer to nature is no guarantee of peace. That’s certainly true of the protagonist in Denis Imbert’s On the Wandering Paths. Jean Dujardin, who won the Best Actor Oscar for The Artist 13 years ago, plays Pierre, an author who barely avoids permanent disabling after a near-fatal fall incurred via drunken stupidity. Told to take his recuperation very slowly and seriously, instead he insists on a solo 1300-kilometer hike on “the hidden paths…linking abandoned villages” around France’s perimeter. It’s an arguably self-destructive decision. But to rethink what got him to this point, Pierre needs to be “safe from the din.”
One gets the idea that despite his somewhat larger-than-life, daredevil persona, he’s spent much of his life running away from human society. We don’t find out a great deal about him, including the causes for an emotional distance thats obviously frustrated intimates like his ex-girlfriend (Josephine Japy) and sister (Izia Higelin). But Dujardin, reined-in yet expressive, makes us feel on some level that we understand this close-mouthed loner—and that the film as a whole is an amplification of his quest, which is less a pursuit of tranquility than an escape from people.
Wandering Paths is “loosely based” on a memoir by adventure travel writer Sylvain Tesson, who did indeed suffer a major accident and stubbornly backpacked at length not long after. But it omits that real-life figure’s more controversial aspects (he’s a darling of France’s political far-right) to arrive at something deceptively simple, evocative and stirring. Not the least of its pleasures is Magali Sylvestre de Sacy’s location cinematography, which captures landscapes much more rugged and diverse than one normally sees in French movies. Alas, while On the Wandering Paths would no doubt look great on the big screen, in the U.S. it’s going straight to DVD on Nov. 5, from Icarus Films.
As physically and psychologically troubled as Pierre is, his outing is a holiday compared to the travails of Kelsey Asbille (from Yellowstone and Wind River) in Don’t Move, which premiered last weekend on Netflix. Directed by one duo (Brian Netto, Adam Schindler), written by another (T.J. Cimfel, David White), it’s an effective survival thriller. Heroine Iris is still in deep mourning from her child’s accidental death a year prior, such that in visiting the parkland hilltop site of that tragedy, she considers taking her own life. That act is prevented, to her initial annoyance, by the arrival of yakkety stranger Richard (Finn Wittrock) at the same outlook. It’s a seemingly innocuous, even mutually-supportive encounter which abruptly takes a very dark turn once they’ve walked back to the parking lot. Richard may have saved Iris’ life for the moment—but only because he has another, different, less-voluntary fate for her in mind.
Set in an undesignated US state or national park, albeit actually shot in rural Bulgaria, Don’t Move springs a lot of twists, and they all work quite well. Iris must fight off not only a serial killer but the slow-acting, short-term paralytic he’s injected her with; it becomes very difficult for her to attract help from passers-by who themselves may not live out the day. Perhaps not truly memorable but punchy, clever and suitably urgent, Don’t Move doesn’t waste a minute of its concise hour and a half.
The great outdoors is also a realm of high peril for young male protagonists in two intriguing if less impressive new features. Andrew Boodhoo Kightlinger’s Lost on a Mountain in Maine, which counts Sylvester Stallone among its producers, dramatizes a case from 1939 in which a 12-year-old boy miraculously survived nine days on his own after being separated from family members during a challenging peak hike.
Donn Fendler (Luke David Blumm) is forever scrapping with better-behaved twin Ryan (Griffin Wallace Henkel), to the exasperation of their father (Paul Sparks), whose absence they keenly feel during his frequent travel for work. In Luke Paradise’s script, an outing to climb Mount Katahdin is meant to make up for that with some masculine bonding time. But instead Donn argues with his father, then his sibling, finally storming away from their guide—just as an actual storm is rolling in, bringing rain, fog, and freezing cold. He promptly gets lost, somehow eluding massive search parties and managing to live to tell the tale well after it was assumed he’d be found dead.
Its reenactment interspersed with interview footage shot many years later (including of real-life Donn, who wrote a book of the same title), this is the kind of story that can hardly help but be scenic and exciting…or so you’d think. Yet it’s not much of either, let alone “moving and inspiring” as billed. While Kightlinger’s direction is technically competent, he can’t seem to decide whether he’s making a “family adventure” or something more artistically ambitious. The result is a humorless film that feels vaguely preachy, with too many pseudo-poetical passages. It has rather unsympathetic one-note characters whose discordant blood ties we’re nonetheless meant to feel sentimental about. It also somehow fails to make it very clear how Donn survived his ordeal, or to capture the northeastern wilderness environment all that distinctively. I’d can’t put a precise finger on just what went amiss here, but Lost is disappointing. It opens in theaters nationwide this Fri/1, though Bay Area venues were as yet unconfirmed at presstime.
Another al fresco letdown is North Macedonian director Vardan Tozija’s Beyond the Wasteland, which suffers from similar issues of being too pretentious for a children’s film yet too simplistic for its loftier aspirations. Approximately 10-year-old Marko (Matej Sivakov) lives in forested isolation under the thumb of his intimidating father (Sasko Kocev), who says he’s keeping the boy safe from “the evil ones,” but may simply be crazy and mean. Wandering where he shouldn’t, Marko discovers a friendly older boy (Aleksandar Nichovski), who appears to have Down’s Syndrome, and lives with his own protective mother (Kamka Tochinovski). When dad reacts violently to this breach of their seclusion, the two boys run off. It is at this fairly advanced point that we realize Wasteland (which was originally titled M) is a zombie apocalypse movie—the “evil ones” are in fact humans a global plague has turned into ravenous monsters.
Handsomely shot, the movie does go somewhere narrative-wise. But that “somewhere” is borderline maudlin (unhelped by Nathanael Bergese’s treacly score). Just before, we get some late-arriving political commentary that is at once heavy-handed and inoffensively generalized. The initial 80 minutes or so are cryptic and turgid. Darijan Pejovski and Tozija’s script aims for elements of a fairy tale, but the latter’s handling waxes so blunt, that element simply comes off as emotional manipulation.
It’s always nice to see a movie of this ilk that has ambitions beyond the most obvious gore-and-action-driven sci-fi horror. But if you see just one post-cataclysm zombie survival tale onscreen this year, you’ll probably be able to find another that’s better than Beyond the Wasteland. Well Go USA releases it to U.S. digital platforms on Nov. 5.
