Directed by:
Gabriel BartalosScreenplay:
Gabriel BartalosComposer:
Dave KlotzCast:
Warwick Davis, George Clayton Johnson, Brian Steele, Kurt Carley, Benoît Lestang, James Ojala, Andy Forrest, Matt RosePlots(1)
As we have seen in Mad God or Killer Klowns from Outer Space, the most bizarre, original, unsettling and purely phantasmagoric visions are haunting the minds of special effects creators. Gabe Bartalos has worked on films by Frank Henenlotter, the Leprechaun series and Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle. In his personal directorial project he takes us on a wild surreal ride into the subconscious of a mad music conductor, filled with large amounts of psychological issues, baggage and the just plain weird. Driven by dream logic, the result plays like a feature length ambient music video consisting of the most grotesque visions by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Shinya Tsukamoto, Terry Gilliam, Michel Gondry or Chris Cunningham. Prepare your eyes and brain, if you can! (The Shockproof Film Festival)
(more)Reviews (2)
I just have a problem with these metaphors, because once it gets going, you actually find that everything is terribly banal, and the surrealism just masks it as being nothing. The guy gets a wooden stick, with which he first manages to orchestrate his life perfectly, before he discovers drugs that make that orchestration impossible. When he then seeks solace in faith or society, he is literally plucked. Two dudes with hats made of maps and dollar bills prevent an old guy from getting to his chicken. The police have the keys to everything and everyone's number, but they're bureaucratically rotten drunken monsters. At a three-way junction, the hero can take either the path of the gnarled stump (chaos) or a neat wooden block (order). All the while, he carries his own self in a bag, which the wild women want to steal from him – but enough already! I understand quite accurately that Bartalos has joined forces with Matthew Barney, whose Cremaster cycle also left me rolling my eyes into unconsciousness.
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The American-French production Saint Bernard is really not for everyone. I am sure most people who stumble across this movie by accident are simply going to turn it off after a while because it is simply not going to do anything for them. I guess people will feel they are watching a movie that does not make any sense at all and is quite ugly visually. Still, despite that, I think director Gabriel Bartalos has made some sort of impression.
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