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Aik Karapetian
Armenian-Latvian film-maker, who, after an initial crime drama 'People Out There', turned to his own brand of light surrealism. He tends to run with a metaphor, an unreal representation of an idea, then films it as if it's a conventional genre-film, merging unconventional logic inside conventional plots. Often uses horror tropes, but with this strange approach, with his own internal logic that is consistent with the metaphor. For example, a violent street thug or a back-woods killer serves as a stand-in for the protagonist's inner psyche and issues with his masculinity, resulting in behavior that doesn't seem to make sense, until one understands the underlying metaphor. A nightmarish surreal metaphor presented as a delirious sequence of violent slasher and home-invasion horror tropes. A worker takes bloody revenge on a rich man that took away his job, then takes over his mansion, and proceeds to live as an exploitative rich man, until he too is invaded by a killer in an orange jacket who may be himself. It's mostly wordless violence, sometimes with nasty sexual abuse, but presented as a confusing nightmare, where you're never quite sure what's real. Class struggle overturns the last class struggle, and violence follows violence, sometimes the killer himself becoming a victim of the same forces. Problem is, this film focuses too much of its time on the mean-spirited violence and nightmare rather than on the social commentary. Karapetian directs another strange metaphor of a movie that poses as a fantasy-horror-comedy. As with his earlier movie 'Firstborn', he tackles the inner psyche of a man who has to be tamed and to tame himself in order to become a husband. Except, this time, he uses two metaphors of a man as a pig, or as a slave pig-farmer, being abused into submission and love. Samuel is a travelling foreigner in search of somebody, but this search turns out to be a red herring, a symbol of his bachelorhood and freedom. He connects with a local woman, whose father promptly chains him in a pigsty and abuses him until he works and obeys, holding back on approving marriage with his daughter until he is broken in. Another aggressive and violent suitor is broken in to become a dog. While this is happening, Sam starts to converse with a talking pig. This is not fantasy, it's the surrealistic form of his transformation to being domesticated like a pig. The tone is an odd blend of filthy abuse and tongue-in-cheek whimsy, with a narrator playing it straight, telling Sam's story as if it were a fairy tale. Karapetian's most successful film so far in terms of catching the right balance. In some ways, reminiscent of 'Calvaire', only with a much lighter tone. Truth is, I wasn't sure if this Armenian-Latvian thriller is supposed to be surreal, or it's just an incoherent thriller, until I visited the director's other films. A dour, slightly aggressive married man faces a crisis of masculinity when his wife is attacked by a silent motorcyclist in the street in front of him. To make things worse, his wife enlists the help of her ex-boyfriend police-man to track down the motorcyclist. The husband decides to take matters into his own hands, but things don't turn out as expected, and the dangers refuse to abate. He gathers his wits to confront the violent man... As a thriller, all of their behaviour makes no sense, the plot is fractured and scenes end suddenly, leaving confusion in their wake, and there is even a fantasy beast in the forest that is obviously unreal. The film is begging to be re-interpreted as a metaphor for the husband facing his inner monsters which are manifested as the bizarre motorcyclist and the beast. On the other hand, the film doesn't speak the language of surrealism, with all of the characters reacting to and taking all of the incoherent events at face value. So the film ends up dysfunctional in both genres. It almost feels like the writer wrote a surreal metaphor and the director misunderstood it and filmed it as a straight thriller, if not for the fact that they are the same person. |
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