How to Break out the (In)visible Prison Bars?
Is freedom of choice, and freedom in general, the greatest slavery?
After the screening of the selection of 11 films in the main competition program of the 31st European Film Festival Palić, it is evident that precisely this freedom of choice was a strong inspiration for the authors.
Starting with the festival opening film, Kinds Of Kindness by Yorgos Lanthimos, through the winning title 78 Days (78 Dana) by Emilija Gašić, all the way to the best film according to the FIPRESCI jury, Magnus von Horn‘s The Girl With The Needle (Pigen med nålen), this series of films, each in its own way, treats freedom as the highest stake.
In this thematic corpus we can also place the films Kalman’s Day (Kálmán-nap), by Szabolcs Hajdu, Gustav Möller’s Sons (Vogter), Noé Debré’s A Good Jewish Boy ( Le dernier des Juifs) and Phedon Papamichael’s Light Falls (Hääbuv Valgus)). That is a good half – or the better half – of the main competition program…
The price of freedom is, we know, high, very high. So, how to break the (in)visible prison bars?
Put the story in a frame, fill it with emotion and some sense, and here is the possible answer? The answer, of course, is too simple, because each of the indicated film stories develops different aesthetics.
Magnus von Horn, in The Girl With The Needle creates an extraordinarily layered story, the viewing of which is similar to peeling an onion: after each layer is removed, another one follows, and the eyes are not excluded either.
The story of the difficult life of the main character, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), who replaces the aimless waiting for her husband – who she hasn’t heard from since he left for the war – with a no less traumatic attempt to experience a little bit of happiness. She gets pregnant and hopes for marriage with the well-to-do boss of the factory where she works, with each subsequent sequence leading us into the spiral of her personal hell.
But wait a little bit. The unsuccessful attempt to have an abortion leads her to the next door of hell – the acquaintance with Dagmar (played by excellent Trine Dyrholm), a woman who will supposedly enable adoption of Karoline’s newborn child, as she does not have the basic means to raise him.
Can man be God and decide the life of others? That is one of the key dilemmas that Magnus von Horn poses. The complex story provokes questions about humanity, the personal choice of life and death, which have strong reflections even nowadays. Karoline, through personal choices, right or wrong, constantly tries to break those invisible bars in society that keep her on the opposite side of a decent life. But it is about her life and the right to make her own decisions…
The cinematographer of The Girl With The Needle, Michal Dymek – known for EO (2022), Sweat (2020) and Cold War (2018) – brilliantly (re)creates the atmosphere in very aesthetic black-and-white picture of post-war Copenhagen from the beginning of the 20th century, full of almost palpable cruelty.
The realistic prison bars in Sons, like medals, have two faces. One is of the criminals and the other of the prison guard Eva (the suggestive Sidse Babett Knudsen), who hides her intimate nightmares about failed parenting. Her choice to transfer the responsibility on her son to prison institutions because of his irreparable violent impulses – comes back to her like a boomerang when she has to face the same problem again – violence in its purest form.
In the other mentioned films we also meet the more or less visible bars of social communications. In classic thriller-horror fashion, Phedon Papamichael places his characters in an isolated building on the seashore, which becomes a dark scene for a showdown between two groups of strangers – one is a couple of girls and the other is migrants. When, after a tragic misunderstanding, the showdown begins, the women’s “tenderness” finds murderous power, and the men’s “reason” becomes a disadvantage.
However, the feeling that there are invisible bars around them that determine their fate is inescapable. The atmosphere is similar in 78 Days, in which the family during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 is condemned to the square footage of a modest country house and the perimeter of the yard. Through a kind of video diary, we witness a cute coming-of-age drama with all its nuances.
In A Good Jewish Boy, religion is an imposed “prison” on the identity from which Ruben Bellisha, a young Jew in a Paris neighborhood left without Jews and kosher shops, wants to escape, but his mother is the consistent guardian of that identity. In Kinds Of Kindness, however, Yorgos Lanthimos, in three stories, tests the ultimate limits of his characters through games with personal integrity.
However, we have witnessed several successful attempts woven from different film aesthetics and genres to guess that urge for freedom of choice…
Stojan Sinadinov
Edited by Amber Wilkinson
© FIPRESCI 2024