Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival: "Vogelfrei"

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Don't ask me why a Latvian movie has a German title, which means either "free of birds" or "free as a bird."

I went to see this film because I'm part Latvian, and anyway, how often does one get to see a Latvian film? However, title was not the only confusing thing about the movie. It starts with a bunch of children, one of whom is a boy named Teodors, playing in the woods. After the children have been playing for a while, suddenly Teodors is a teenager chickening out on getting intimate with a girl. After that episode, he is a b.s.-ing advertising executive who lives in a barely furnished apartment and can't connect with anyone. Then he's a taciturn old man who plays the organ in a rural church and who, after the service, is hired by some city slickers to take them out into the forest to capture a hawk (Why they want a hawk is never explained.)

The individual vignettes had a certain charm, and the film is beautifully photographed as a whole, but it is as distant and enigmatic as Teodors himself. Another puzzling aspect is that Teodors seems to age about sixty years or seventy years in the film, and yet all the vignettes, take place in either recent or contemporary times.

So my overall reaction to this film is "Huh?" Still, it was interesting to see Latvia on film. The countryside looks a lot like northern Minnesota. There were a lot of Latvians in the audience, judging by the language people were speaking, but unfortunately, I don't know more than a few dozen words and phrases in Latvian, so I was unable to understand the babble of comments they made after the film was over.

ON EDIT: I looked up this film on the IMDB, and it turns out that each segment was directed by a different director. That would explain the apparent lack of connetion among the segments, although not the fact that Teodors' whole life seems to have taken place since the end of the Soviet Union.

[kickysnana]

1. A Hemmingwayesque film. I do love scenery thought. n/t

[AnnieBW]

2. FREEBIRD!!!

Oh, sorry... must have been mistranslated.