The end is nigh: social realism, Alienation, Concrete Night

Wednesday was the most disappointing day of the FIPRESCI screenings. Two films, both are of the most banal kind – social realist drama about male characters suffering from problems of contemporary world. One came from Slovenia (Seduce Me – troubled young adult falls in love and enters into conflict with his corrupted boss), the other, from Slovakia (My Dog Killer – a neo-nazi skinhead (again!) finds out he has a gypsy half-brother), but both could be easily made anywhere and by anyone. Bleak colors – both set in autumn, as usual with this kind of movies – hand-held “reportage” camera, sequence shots, brutal violence: you know this stuff, there’re already too many films like this.

There isn’t much to say either about Heavy Mental, a film from Poland, directed by Sebastian Buttny. It’s a character-driven dramedy about the generation of Polish thirty year olds, but these characters, usually based on one or two traits, don’t look very convincing.

The prevalence of bleak reality was disrupted by Alienation, a film directed by the Bulgarian filmmaker Milko Lazarov. Although Bulgarian-produced, this enigmatic picture has very strong presence of Greek element – to the point that the dialogues, scarce as they are, are carried on entirely in Greek through the whole first half of the film. Also, the style of Alienation is very close to that of Greek New Wave (Giorgos Lanthimos, Athena Rachel Tsangari), although Lazarov drops the most evident hallmark of this movement – inclination to absurd and quirkiness. Nonetheless, Alienation stars Christos Stergioglou (he played the father in Lanthimos’s Dogtooth), and employs other important features of the new Greek cinema – slow but rhythmically organized pace, static shots, and deliberate discordance of different elements. For instance, the film’s imagery simulates the 1970s – in production design, color, props (such as the protagonist’s car), and even the method of shooting (analog, probably 16mm, though I’m not sure), – but the setting is, in fact, modern: we can deduce that from a couple of minor details only. The story itself is also about discordance – as the title promises, we have different kinds of alienation. Stergioglou’s character talks to his mother who never responds – she’s paralyzed, – mechanically screws his wife; then appears a Bulgarian woman who doesn’t understand his language, and a deaf-mute guy. At this point Stergioglou’s attempts for communication rise to a shriek, or a howl. Alienation concludes on an apocalyptic note – the Bulgarian gives birth to a child who is to be bought by Stergioglu's charachter, and we see the newborn’s face overlapped with the grim image of hills covered by forest. The child screams, thunder rolls beneath the dark sky.

Somewhat close to Alienation in matters of tone was Concrete Night, a film directed by the acclaimed Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo that was screened in the international competition – although stylistically this film is an antithesis of the Bulgarian movie. Peter Flinckenberg’s rich, contrastive black and white imagery, sophisticated dialogues, and the films dreamlike – or, more precisely, nightmare-like – quality are opposite to Milko Lazarov’s unglamorous approach, and remind, if anything, of Bela Tarr’s work. But the apocalyptic feel is also there: the film’s protagonist teenager Simo wanders through disturbingly hostile concrete jungle of night Helsinki with his brother who divines the world after humanity.