Landscape. 2000. Directed by Martin Sulik.

(3/13/01)

This film didn't make much of an impression on me. It is mostly a series of anecdotes reflecting on Slovakia's troubled history. I will say, though, that the picture gained in power towards the end.

I didn't like Martin Sulik's sense of humor. Towards the beginning there is a scene where a child is dying from choking. The father makes a mad dash to find a doctor. (This is shown in speeded-up motion.) On the way, he stops to order a coffin. A man wears his jacket backwards as he rides his bicycle. He is hit by a car. The police find him and note that he is still breathing, but think that his head has been twisted. They twist it back. He isn't breathing any more. Other people in the audience laughed heartily at scenes like this; I didn't.

The film has a feel of folklore about it--of stories that have been told and repeated. It has a feel to it that reminded me of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, although I can't quite identify what brings that comparison to mind.

Some of the best scenes occur towards the end, as I said. There is a poignant, haunting sequence where a woman returns for a visit after being away for thirty years and meets a woman she had known when she was much younger. The woman brings her home and they spend the night together as old friends. The woman who has been away admires the other woman's hair. She shows her how she cuts it every ten years and keeps it in a drawer. As the other woman sleeps she cuts her hair and gives it to her the next day as a gift.

The next day the two women go to a tree where the woman who moved believed she had carved her initials many years before. The two women search and climb the tree, but there is no trace of the initials. They leave, deciding that the bark of the tree has overgrown the initials, but a narrator informs us that the tree on which the woman had carved her initials had been chopped down. It wasn't the same tree.

At the end of the film a boy's father disappears. He searches for him and finds him dead in the snow. (I believe he died around railroad tracks.) This sequence was beautifully photographed amidst stark, snowy landscapes.

For me, the most haunting scene of all is the one in which the verger goes through a cemetery on his way home and comes across a man whom he had known many years before. The man is a Jew who had been taken away during the holocaust. I forget what this man tells the verger. He is searching to find out what happened to his wife or something like that. A moment or so later the verger turns to look at him and he has disappeared, suggesting that he was a spirit rather than a living person. That scene really worked.

There was an interesting use of color. Some scenes were very highly saturated. In particular, some scenes were very yellow or golden brown.