A leisurely, beautiful look at grief and despair. It's set specifically in Poland in 2010- a year of unprecedented disasters: floods early in the year, the death of the country's president and many senior officials in a 'plane crash, on an official visit of commemoration to Katyn, a volcanic eruption which grounded aircraft throughout Europe. TV images of these events accompany the main characters through the film. At the same time, a young man, a poet and scholar, who was injured and scarred in a car crash which killed the driver, the young man's best friend, and his wife or girlfriend- it isn't made clear which- wanders around, relying on prescription drugs and a recording of Dante's Divine Comedy and fantastic visions to keep him going. The young man walks or drives, sleeping irregularly, ambushed by dreams or memories, talking with the dead, having hallucinatory visions in a surreal world, while his aunt, a philosopher and Stoic, offers the words of Epictetus, Seneca, Heidegger saying that life and death are illusory. A bikinied girl from a TV gameshow comes to life to offer comfort to him; a whore entertains a customer in a cemetery vault; the young man's dead father yokes oxen and ploughs up the sterile tiles of a supermarket; an ineffectual angel watches the young woman's body in a cathedral- this was the first scene- and at the end water crashes through the roof of the cathedral and floods away across the floor. It isn't a Christian vision- the only priest is ineffective- but there is a religious aspect to this solemn ritualistic pageant: perhaps beauty itself is one of the consolations of existence. In the end it seems that the young man- and Poland have escaped from the grim fugue.
2 Reviews
Death and grief
hof-42 March 2024
Warning: Spoilers
Adam, a young poet and professor of literature has been in a terrible car accident in which his girlfriend Basia and his best friend Kamil were killed. He was the driver and escaped with only a scar on his face. His grief is compounded by guilt; in a spectral conversation with Kamil, he is reminded that the accident may have been caused by a wrong split second decision on his part. He has abandoned poetry and the university and, numbed by pills sleepwalks through a job in a sterile, fluorescent lighted supermarket. His parents are dead and the only member of the family in sight is middle aged aunt Xenia, that frets after him and tries to penetrate the shell he has created around himself. Xenia quotes ancient Persian poets, Seneca and Heidegger, but Adam finds no solace in these or in the advice of a priest.
Adam finds a sort of connection with Dante, who did not try to disguise grief and death; in fact, the Divina Commedia functions as a sort of unifying frame that carries the movie along. We are witness to sumptuously filmed, dreamlike scenes governed by the twisted but internally solid logic of teams. The scheme succeeds but with some flaws; in 2010 Poland suffered various tragedies, one the death of many Government figures in a plane crash. These are incorporated as a backdrop but do not mesh well with the material And, some scenes (like the plowing of the supermarket floor) are topheavy with obvious symbolism.
The title, Onirica fits the movie to a T. Why Field of Dogs? Perhaps because in Dante's Inferno dogs are representative of evil and ferocity; the condemned are pursued by famished dogs or, in other passages, behave like dogs,and demons resemble mastiffs.
Adam finds a sort of connection with Dante, who did not try to disguise grief and death; in fact, the Divina Commedia functions as a sort of unifying frame that carries the movie along. We are witness to sumptuously filmed, dreamlike scenes governed by the twisted but internally solid logic of teams. The scheme succeeds but with some flaws; in 2010 Poland suffered various tragedies, one the death of many Government figures in a plane crash. These are incorporated as a backdrop but do not mesh well with the material And, some scenes (like the plowing of the supermarket floor) are topheavy with obvious symbolism.
The title, Onirica fits the movie to a T. Why Field of Dogs? Perhaps because in Dante's Inferno dogs are representative of evil and ferocity; the condemned are pursued by famished dogs or, in other passages, behave like dogs,and demons resemble mastiffs.
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