Dionysos

Truly loneliness and isolation, but this time on a higher level: as if the transition from the jungle to the city not only meant a change of scenery but also a transition from one structure of the human self to another - the unconscious and the fantastic. It is as if the phantasm, embodied by Vargas as the main hero on the silver screen, only doubled Vargas' despairing isolation as a real person, instead of serving the human subject in a better light (as a proper psychoanalytic phantasm). No, Vargas is both in the world of illusory film and in the real world, all alone, sentenced to become a literal wandering "specter" (a literal "phantasm") alongside the other characters of the film ("Los Muertos" and "Phantom"). A crushing view of humanity, which cannot escape reality even in its dreams and films, from which it seeks to escape through them. The comparison to Hotel Monterey is fitting (hallways, elevators) and we can also appreciate the overall change of location - after all, the cold lines of lifeless architecture correspond better to the fate of the human characters (and make them precisely "human" indecent) than the vibrant green of the rainforest.

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.

Painful decision-making between two equally valid social demands - preserving the past, including its material remnants, which may become obstacles to progress at a certain point, or sacrificing something from ourselves and our ancestors for the sake of the future. Because if we want (and we must) move forward, we have to leave something behind. But on the other hand: "We are what we remember. Without memory, we disappear, cease to exist, and our past is erased, and yet we pay little attention to memory except in cases where it abandons us. I do very little to exercise, nurture, strengthen, and protect it." (Mark Twain) Yes, we must look forward, but at the same time, we must not forget what we have left behind. But what if we are in a fog, where is the front and where is the back? In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Russia found itself in a fog, as it had so many times in its long history...

A thoroughly original copy, which not only pays tribute to/steals from/lets itself be inspired by the visually striking references and forgets itself in the film Last Year at Marienbad. It is difficult to determine what is Japanese about the film, apart from the two main actors and the (invisible) crew, when everything else we see is European material viewed in the style of Resnais and Antonioni. Yoshida and his team have created a strangely fascinating simulacrum of European progressive cinema, which, together with the story of a painful melancholic search and missed love, fascinates with its relevance to the time and icons. This is especially true of the form, which, in its somewhat empty (often slavish) imitation of its models, reminds us of the artificiality of the choice of kitschy stage sets of the "most beautiful" and "most iconic" European destinations, from the Eiffel Tower through the Roman Forum to London and Lisbon, where the entire film takes place. However, these scenes are also among the most interesting in their own way. Nevertheless, Yoshida absorbed the experimental narrative structure through (not only) this film (not entirely successful in itself, but reaching above the average of that time as well as today), which he soon after ingeniously and completely originally used in his subsequent films, following in the footsteps of his European teachers, playing with the temporality of the plot and the nature of the characters, dealing with alienation and love/life/politics, etc.

"They'll slit your throat for a nickel. Nothin' personal. They just want the extra nickel." A poignant critique of mammoth corporations and all-capable companies, striving only for profit maximization and loss minimization. It is particularly sad when confronted with Mexican immigrants who seek work and a better life in the USA but are only granted the honor of being plucked within the wheel of corporate capitalism.

The expression "spiritual incest" is accurate, but we can go further and ask ourselves - why, when we watch two half-naked men in a tight embrace, when we see their silent loving looks through detailed shots and reverse shots, why, when the whole film is bathed in soft sunlight and toned with warm colors like a Paraguayan soap opera, why, when lyrical music by the famous Russian homosexual Tchaikovsky plays (and Sokurov hits us directly over the head with this information), why are we not willing to imagine what we would automatically imagine in any other relationship? Why do we not perceive the relationship between these two characters as homosexual, even though they exist in a purely masculine world (the very few female characters are always symbolically and physically separated from the male characters - like the son's girlfriend/through a window, balcony/) and, not knowing the film's title or overhearing how they address each other, we would see them as members of a sexual minority? In the film, those who want to can perceive it as an intimate human drama or as a cinematic play with the cultural and social expectations of the audience, which, for civilizational reasons, prevent us from deducing an otherwise logical plot culmination and evoke unpleasant feelings with the return of suppressed psychological forces.

The greatest strength of the film is its greatest weakness: the counterpoint of matter and spirit, body and soul. The materiality of the body brilliantly intrudes into Sokurov’s otherwise typical slow flow and into lyrical classical/preromantic images. The repulsive bloated body of Mephisto amidst female purity in the beginning; Margarete’s beauty gradually ending in a shot of the vulva: the symbol of the gradual disturbance of the balance between soul and body, and the reduction of what is noble in a man (his disgust for God) to an animal (non)essence. Who introduced imbalance and Sin into the world of balance between soul and body? Who abandoned patient asceticism of knowledge, and who exchanged the promise of a constantly advancing future of science for one night with Margarete? The answer is also the answer to the question of why this typically religious interpretive framework is the film's greatest drawback: unlike Goethe's masterpiece, it completely flattens Faust's story into a Manichaean struggle between soul and matter - only Mephisto can come from the body, matter, and sex. Faust is no longer a self-destructive hero who has already achieved everything in knowledge and who joins forces with the devil to know even more, and thus he must also know what escapes science. Now he is just an impatient and defeated renegade of spiritual work, who succumbed to desire and ended up in a barren desert on his journey for bodily pleasures, which means the death of the body and the spirit. Sokurov's Days of Eclipse also took place in a desert, but the direction was the opposite: detachment from a filthy reality led upwards... here, falling away from God is inevitable. Therefore, the review must also be less.

According to Lyotard, the collapse of the "grand narratives" of modernity was accompanied by mourning - the mourning of the "postmodern" people at the end of the century over the certainties that those grand unifying stories of emancipation, freedom, and progress offered them. Here we can see the collapse of one of these grand narratives twice over - not only the collapse of the story of freedom and equality, the socialist ideal and a better society, but also the collapse of the linearly narrated film story, of a film unified by a certain principle (whether it is the bourgeois Hollywood dream of the main characters' crucial role, whose motivations unify the plot, or another weakened form of unification, such as a certain message, the chronology of events, logical causality of the story, etc.). If we return to the aforementioned mourning, it is clearly evident that it returns to us twice over. Not only within Godard's message, the lamentation over Europe's betrayal of its ideals, its effort to change and become better, but again purely within the framework of the film and its form - after all, what else but this mourning can "connect" (since I cannot use the word unify...) the individual fragments, caesuras, and singular fragments that the film is composed of other than this sad yet liberating human and film mourning?

Godard, by his standards, is completely accessible even for those who do not particularly appreciate his unique film language. Based on the screenplay by his long-time collaborator and partner Anne-Marie Miéville and (rather loosely) inspired by Mérimée/Bizet's original story, he creates not only a story about the passion of Carmen and her male "victims," but also connects it with a narrative line depicting smaller terrorist actions of a group of young people who try to obtain money for making their film and capture their other activities with its help. The one who is supposed to direct their film (though without knowing the above) is none other than Godard himself, playing himself (and also Carmen's uncle). The captivating visual and musical form of the destructive relationship between the young man and woman is complemented from the other side by the ironic self-reflection of the "aging and failed" director. However, in the end, he does not shoot the film (could it be a symbolic separation from his Maoist past of the 60s/70s, at least in terms of an explicit connection between film and ideology?).

For viewers unfamiliar with Russian history and realities, this film will primarily be a fictional documentary about a Soviet rocket to the moon; for others, it will be a highly original and subjective reflection of the Soviet 1930s. From this perspective, the film operates more on the level of fantasy, drama, and imagination. The illusion of being a documentary and period accuracy may not be as strong as it could have been, but that might only bother the first type of viewers - the rest will enjoy a plastically and only in the style of sci-fi/fantasy elaborate world of alternative Stalinism. When you watch closely, the film is perhaps even more about the overall space program than the rocket and, above all, about what surrounded it: human destinies against the backdrop of secret actions and NKVD espionage, as well as the tremendous tension and enthusiasm of the generation of that time. The 1930s are portrayed by Fedorchenko as both cruel and touching, with the typically Russian attention to the absurdity of human fate. Secret police officers burning documents of the supposed Russian moon landing that everyone believed did not happen, while it "actually" did occur - what could be more paradoxical? Fedorchenko uses fictional film psychotherapy to come to terms with the trauma of his nation, namely the fact that the immense efforts of the interwar generation were betrayed by the Stalinist system and forgotten.