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International Cinema: Fairytale (2022) - Reviewed
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| Courtesy of Intonations |
Then the unthinkable happened in 2022 with Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine and suddenly the legendary People’s Artist of the Russian Federation,
who was no stranger to controversies with Russian border guards and in
particular the Russian president, was compelled to make among his most
incendiary and peculiarly provocative films in all of his oeuvre: Fairytale. Completed in 2022 and released during the war
in a film the director claims is apolitical, it is a surreal waking-nightmare fever
dream state in a mystical unrealistic wonderland where Adolf Hitler, Benito
Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill mingle together to determine the
fate of the world around the cusp of the Second World War. Utilizing a bevy of complicated visual effects
technologies and archival footage compounded by voice actors speaking mostly
English but sometimes Russian, German or Italian, the film marks the director’s
first animation project in something that’s never been seen before and at times
in this deliberate cinematic purgatory I thought my eyes were playing tricks on
me.
Ethereal, pure and seemingly formless as the digital cameras
careen slowly across illustrated hand drawn landscapes that drift in and out of
photorealism as the four characters interact and sometimes multiply like
gremlins, the film is an artistic declaration stemming from a Russian newspaper
that is intended to be a surreal odyssey through another dimension vaguely
resembling our own. Told with that
intentionally elongated delivery of whispered dialogue Lars Von Trier fans have
grown accustomed to as it cuts freely between characters either conversing with
each other or their doppelgangers, watching Fairytale is like looking
through a hazy fog somewhere between the scratchy dirtied up images of Harmony
Korine’s julien donkey-boy and the dense blur of David Lynch.
Though sporting an echoey distant score by Murat Kabardokov,
most of Fairytale is a sleepy soundscape with the characters dreamily
muttering their exchanges to each other either in English or in their own
respective languages. With reverberating
voices that radiate through the rooms and cavernous realms the characters
meander in and out of, it feels somewhat like Heaven replete with a God and
Jesus but it is cloaked in black-and-white sepia tonality with some occasional
splashes of color. Given this was almost
completely a digital workflow animation project, it is hard to know where the
dividing lines begin and end between historical footage and computer-generated
alterations to the footage. Mostly though
as the film lulls us into a state of lucid dreaming that feels real but clearly
has been reworked into something imaginary and otherworldly.
Coming up against calls from Ukrainians to boycott Russian
films during the war and hitting a marketplace that invariably will not know
what to do with it, Fairytale is the kind of animation achievement only
a major visionary filmmaker could realize.
A movie that manages to take a bizarre deep dive into four major historical
figures at a pivotal moment in world history, a movie that challenges the very notion
of how to process movies or film footage in general, Fairytale is truly
a one-of-a-kind endeavor sure to make his contemporaries jealous. Not a film that is easily recommended, an
oddly agnostic apolitical yet spiritual odyssey through history isn’t going to
be an easy sell for audiences. But for
those keen on the work of Sokurov who continues to push against convention and
the limits of what a single film can express, Fairytale is extraordinary
and not to be missed by adventurous cinephiles!
--Andrew Kotwicki
