My first viewing of this movie made me feel restless and his classic short films worked better for me. After many years, a second immediate viewing as I'm doing for many films amidst this pandemic. I returned and I felt terrible for missing the theme and not being able to capture the mood of the film in my first viewing. It is with much better results and the experience is more than poetic and a brilliant wrapping of genres accentuated by the melancholic score.
On the surface, it is a typical Gladwell film, as timeless, a place far away from all modern times, a story that his fans quite well know, and he can be classified as an expert in evoking that nostalgic feeling. But underneath there's TERROR and an interesting mix of folk horror. You'll find out when you watch the film, and the real excitement comes with the way it's shot and edited. It is nothing short of a miracle!
It is also a strongly nostalgic work, and this melancholy is born of conflict between past and the present, and the reality experienced by the character as he anticipates for the resurrection of old souls. The way in which, due to commercial and cultural developments, the traditions are disappearing to make way for a gang of speed enthusiasts - the present.
The film is a journey of an old man who maintains a graveyard in an old village church. He commutes with the past, with a rooster, tending the soil, and his heartbeat is no longer a companion to the modernity or to the people around him. He leaves no stones unturned to forget the past and reminds that a piece of nostalgia still exists in his imaginations. The past is evoked through fragments of stories as seen through the eyes of the old man and his reminiscences while on duty. The images overlap with some wonderful slow-motion edits, all to the soundtrack by David Fanshawe in which they fit perfectly, and to the rhythm of the narration of the old man.
It is also one of the very few films that has successfully combined genres and also has a folk-horror layer to it. In a key scene which feels like a genre hopping in a sudden turn of events when the dead resurrects. My god, its conceptual representation, in the overcoming of the absence, the one that this old man endures is shot so brilliantly. There are amazing shots that looks straight out of Audrius Stonys, Víctor Erice, Joris Ivens, Cecilia Mangini, Süha Arin, Dénes Nagy, Jonas Mekas, Shinsuke Ogawa, Jean-Claude Rousseau, Yoshishige Yoshida, Peter Nestler, Christopher Makoto Yogi, Eduardo Coutinho, Johan van der Keuken, Sumiko Haneda and Hilal Baydarov's universe. In few scenes, I could draw comparison to Lava (1989) by Tadeusz Konwicki and thought to myself if I can tweak few things and merge both the worlds, like a prequel of some sorts with a little of bit of adventure from Penda's Fen.
Overall a nostalgic, fantasy journey with little terror, nudity and a 16mm Masterpiece.
