Dear Lovage,
I had quite a bad shock today in the cinema.
As you may also know, this year's Golden Horse Film Festival launched last Friday. There are different "groups" of films, so to speak, divided as thus:
Panorama
Global Image
Japan's New Film
Men and Women
All That Cinema
Sweets and Shorts
Digital Odyssey
A Tribute to Piert Paolo Pasolini
A Tribute to Sung Chuen Sau
A Tribute to Marlene Dietrich
Made in Taiwan
Czech director, Jan Svankmajer, is highly praised and well known in the international film industry for his original and creative works of animated features and short films. The Golden Horse Film Festival had even featured a tribute to him, although obviously not this time round.
Because "Otesanek" is an animated feature film, it falls into the category of Sweets and Shorts with the other cartoons. I didn't pay much attention to the introductory passage, and went ahead to buy the ticket. What a mistake...
The film is a horror fairy tale. The diretor's usage of his camera had such a powerful impact on my viewing experience that I found myself slightly nauseated at my own chewing and eating sensation after many hours.
"Otesanek" tells the story of a hapless couple's so-called baby. The couple, with a desperate desire for children, gets trapped in its own fantasy of a treetrunk that looks like a new born baby: Their stubborn imagination makes the wooden object come to life, but from then on the tree baby, named Otik, disrupts the social order of the whole building with catastrophic results.
Throughout the film you see loads of close up shots of food, serving food, eating food, talking lips, the rolling tongue that grows out of the the tree baby, ...etc. Really was too graphic for my taste, although I have to admit that the cinematography was an excellent job and the irony and black humour depicted were fantastic.
Otesanek is the tree trunk that looks like a human baby, which grows like a human being and eats up his father, mother, neighbours, the farmers, the herds, and eventually was killed by an old woman who grows cabbages.
That is the fairy tale.
So is the film, although we didn't get to see him chopped up by a spade.
Ugh. What a disgustingly gross but fantastic piece of work.
How are you? Seen Harry Potter?
I hope you can enjoy the cinema as much as I am enjoying it now. This is truly wonderful. I haven't seen so many good films in a long time.
Take care love
hugs and kisses
parsley
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