There are films that so fuck with your sense of time they transfigure the space around you after you leave the theater,
on the streets, or in a bar or restaurant, or on the long streetcar ride home; films in which every shot has been so charged with tension,
shots in which nothing happens, for a long time, every moment taking on this incredible weight, weighting for something to happen ...
every detail on the screen weighing down on you, the unbearable totality of the environment you’ve been dropped into ...
when you finally walk out into the outside air, that cloud of slowness, of the oppressive thereness of space, travels with you like a bubble.
The tiniest detail of interaction with other people – ordering a beer, making momentary eye contact with a driver as you cross the street in front of his car –
takes on this profound significance, as if each quotidian detail were a turning point of your own life, and everything around you moves so quickly, so fluidly,
as you move so slowly, so ponderously, as if you were a pedal point slowed down to 16 rpm while a baroque tapestry ran haywire above you at 78 ...
films like Stalker, like Satantango ... me and twenty other people saw one of those films tonight (as if you hadn’t guessed), and two hours later I’m still trying to
resynchronize; a film from Romania with the appalling title Every Day God Kisses Us on the Mouth.
We meet our protagonist Dumitru (a phenomenal performance by Dan Condurache) , as he is being discharged from prison after serving a sentence for murder that has spanned the
transition from the old regime to the new; everything’s changed, people keep telling him, but he rejects the idea. He’s right:
nothing has changed, not because one government is like another, but because we’ve been cast into a doom-ridden world where
the idea of change is impossible; a world of mud and poverty, yes, but even more a world of fate and curses, where every move is
the wrong one.
Dumitru’s homecoming has all the joy of Alex’s in A Clockwork Orange, or Franz Biberkopf’s in Berlin Alexanderplatz; that is, none (as Döblin has it: the punishment begins).
Insult is piled on insult, catastrophe upon castrophe, until he is spit out to wander across the country from disaster to disaster (like that other put-upon McDowell character, Mick Travis in O Lucky Man), as he says, looking for his [F]ather.
And along the way, every time he finds a little happiness ...
“You’re going to die,” a gypsy tells him at the beginning of the film. “Everybody dies,” he responds. “There is death ... and death.” And so there are,
deaths and deaths, but not his own. And as the scenes become more and more surreal and dreamlike, he understands that God must have a use for him. Mustn’t He?
This is apparently the first feature by Sinisa Dragin 1 ; he’s obviously been influenced by Bela Tarr – down to the sepiatone cast to the film – but there
are certainly worse influences to bear on one’s sleeve. Aside from sometimes betraying its videocam origins (particularly sad given the striking lighting design and
composition – how rich that sepiatone might have been!) a flawless debut, the best film I didn’t see in 2001.
