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BURNING
IN THE WIND
4/10
Brucio
Nel Vento : Italy/Switzerland
2002 : Silvio Soldini : 118 mins
Gloomy,
lugubrious Tobias (Ivan Franek) works in a gloomy Swiss watch factory,
and spends his evenings writing lugubrious poetry that looks back to his
gloomy childhood in an unidentified, gloomy, lugubrious eastern European
country. He ran away after stabbing – perhaps fatally – the man he though
was just his teacher, but who turned out to be his father, and for years
he’s been obsessed with the memory of a school-friend called Line (Barbara
Lukesova). One day she shows up to work at his factory, by now married
with a child of her own. But this doesn’t make any difference to Tobias:
nothing will stop him finding happiness with the woman of his dreams,
not even the discovery Lina is his own half-sister…
Soldini’s
direction has moments of startling poetic intensity, but all his hard
work counts for very little in the face of a script which, as even this
brief synopsis indicates, is a hopelessly melodramatic series of contrivances
and implausibilities. The initial premise isn’t bad – as played by the
magnetically morose Franek, Tobias is set up as an intriguing, his day-job
indicating he’s in search of lost time, and a sense of completeness. His
intense, brooding sensibility to extend into the film’s own atmosphere:
there’s one remarkable, hallucinatory image of ants swarming over a white
coffee cup that belongs in a drastically better film.
Because
the more we find out about Tobias (who, as it turns out, isn’t even called
Tobias at all) the more unlikely and irritating he becomes. Once Line
arrives on the scene, events spiral from amour fou into ‘amour
farce,’ culminating with a final-act leap into total preposterousness
which is, apparently, completely at odds with what happens in Agota Kristof’s
well-regarded source novel Hier – it’s not exactly clear what’s
going on, but a main character is, apparently, stabbed twice in
two separate incidents.
Just
as the moody instrumental score, initially so beguiling and evocative,
soon becomes gratingly repetitive, Tobias rapidly emerges less like a
tortured, sympathetic artist and more like an egotistical delusionist,
or, to put it in less poetic terms, a royal pain in the ass. He doesn’t
even seem much of a poet, if the snatches of his work we’re given are
any indication: “In my head, a rocky pathway leads to a dead bird…” and
so on. Burning in the Wind is exactly the kind of film Tobias would
come up with – and that’s not a compliment.
10th
March, 2002
(seen 9th February, Berlinale-Palast – Berlin
Film Festival)
by Neil
Young
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