It’s hard to be in the audience too. This adaptation of Arkadiy and Boris Strugatskiy’s novel (their book The Roadside Picnic was the basis of Tarkovsky’s Stalker) is an equally disturbing, fascinating and dull affair. The last film by the late Aleksy German, the editing fell to his brother and wife who, by the looks of it, decided to include everything he shot. At almost three hours the visually stunning but narratively repetitive ‘sci-fi’ can test the good humour of even the most patient viewer.
With toothless grins, matted hair, faeces splattered across the open sores on their faces, they stumble about in the filth and mud. The castle walls drip urine onto the rotted dead who still hang by their necks – so great in number they have to be pushed aside so one can pass. Whores are impaled on giant phalluses. The weather, with its short but powerful downpours and impenetrable rolling fog, is unpredictable. A man runs by naked. There are screams. Slaves, manacled at the neck, are tugged to and fro. Those who aren’t half mad are drunk. Now here comes a tank towing musicians. There’s no rhyme, no reason, no order.
This is hell.
But it’s not. It’s decaying a town on a neighbouring planet, a fortified settlement built on a swamp. Details are sparse but it seems that some time ago thirty scientists have landed on the planet which has never experienced the Renaissance and so wallow in the Middle Ages. The focus is on Don Rumata (Yarmolnik), a scientist who observes the goings on. He’s deemed a noble and some of the locals to believe the son of a pagan god. By the time we meet him he’s a corrupted version of himself – drinking, whoring, killing – but still manages to remember why he’s there, and engages in the odd philosophical debate.
That synopsis pushing it, a best guess, as the unclear and monotonous story takes a back seat to the setting. With little to enjoy narrative wise, the eye looks past the characters and to the impressive lived-in set design and the deliberately disconcerting direction, shot in beautiful, stark black and white. The lines sound dubbed, the mangled narration filling in some of the blanks but confuses more often than not. The characters are aware of the camera as it circles the random events and zooms in and out of faces, tilted at awkward angles, closing in on the oddest things. Every frame is packed solid, characters squeezed in too tightly. Pots, swords, hooks, severed chicken legs and more are dangled into frame. The scenes play like a madman’s fevered nightmare, a chaotic depravity: Terry Gilliam meets Hironimus Bosch.
German offers up some of the most haunting and disturbing images of the year but there was a better, shorter, tighter film here.
