WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

	Milos Stehlik

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What's striking about the European Union Film Festival currently playing in Chicago is how it reflects the cultural pudding that is the EU itself—a grand idea mostly paralyzed in the hands of an army division of bureaucrats.

But good things DO happen in Europe—cheese, chocolate, opera, art—and occasionally now, a film which manages to stay true to its cultural roots, gritty and committed in its outlook, small, independent, without a vestige of the homogenization that so often follows multi-national film production.

Two such small, inventive films play in this year's European Union Film Festival: Fred Kelemen's Fallen, a Latvian/German co-production, and Januz Burger's Slovenian film, Ruins.

Both films are actor and image-centered. Fallen, shot in magnificent black and white, is the fourth feature by the talented Kelemen, who wrote, shot, and directed the film after he got an idea while teaching at the Latvian Culture Academy in Riga. The plot is very simple. One night, Matiss crosses a bridge in Riga and in the middle of the bridge comes across the figure of a young blonde who is sitting on the wrong side of the railing. She faces him with a blank expression on her face, and then turns back.

Matiss slowly walks on. But when he reaches the end of the bridge, he hears a loud splash, and then a cry for help. He runs back to the spot where he encountered the blonde, peers into the watery darkness, and sees nothing. He rushes to the end of the bridge, finds a phone booth, and calls the police. They arrive and question him.

Then, gradually, we discover who Matiss is—an employee of the Latvian national archives. This is a faceless and lifeless bureaucracy. The image of the blonde girl continues to occupy Matiss, and he returns to the scene the next day. Then he poses as the woman's boyfriend and gets custody of the handbag that she left behind, and some discarded letters addressed to a certain Alexej.

But the handbag also contains the claim stub for a set of photographs being developed in a shop, and Matiss collects these. He projects the slides onto the wall of his apartment. And he begins to construct the narrative behind the blonde girl's life. He sees the girl first with one man, then two male companions. He tracks down Alexej, the man to whom the letter is addressed. And there is a surprising climax, quite worthy of Antonioni and Blow-Up, to which Fallen could be construed as a reference.

The power and the quiet beauty of Fallen lies in the way that it captures absences and silences—both of these are more expressive than pages upon pages of dialogue. The setting—especially the decaying ruins of the Baltic port, its atmosphere of collapse, its quietude—create a film which is very special—a small but genuine treasure.

In contrast, Ruins, the second feature by the talented Slovenian filmmaker Janez Burger, is full of people. At its center is Herman, a somewhat ego-maniacal theatre director. Herman invites all of his friends and the people he's worked with throughout the years to create a new, spectacular performance. This is supposed to be performed in the open air, as the highlight of a major theater festival. But almost as soon as the rehearsals begin, things get complicated. The director manipulates his old friends. The atmosphere grows darker, full of intrigue. Herman is mysterious about his intentions, and the tension mounts. Gradually we begin to see the parallels between the play and the private lives of the actors and how they reflect on each other.

Berger said that he wanted to make a film dealing with the question of the role of love in a world which is egocentric—“Can love exist in a world in which everybody pays attention only to him/herself?” Ruins is a film, he says, about people who would like to love but can't. It's a film about emotional invalids, which he made during a time of his own personal crisis. But when he was making the film, he realized that being preoccupied with one's own personal problems is, in its own way, ridiculous. And so Ruins became a film filled with irony, a comic view of life which may be serious, but it is also often ridiculous.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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