DIRECTED BY: Daniel Fawcett, Clara Pais
FEATURING: Joana Castro, Bruno Senune, Carina de Matos, Falvia Barabas, Daniel Pires
PLOT: Shuffling between the interior and exterior of a building (with guest appearances from some jagged cliffside rocks), various symbolic events occur because of the actions of various symbolic people.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This clutter of film scenes might be interpreted as “weird”, but I’m leery to describe the onscreen capering as a “movie”. Perhaps it’s just my staggering lack of interpretive skills, but when the characters are only somewhat explainable because you read the opening credits, I find the “movie” part a bit wanting. Not much is clear, and the lack of dialogue handily augments the altogether excessive incoherence of the narrative.
COMMENTS: I shall begin by saying that Daniel Fawcett and Clara Pais may well have accomplished something impressive with their symbol-ridden film, The Kingdom of Shadows. Throughout the film there are little hiccups of inspired images that, in isolation, would make for compelling photographs to ponder. The lack of dialogue lends itself to a lack of explanation, but that allows for a mutuality of incomprehension across the globe. Unfortunately, it leaves the viewer grasping blindly for what it is the filmmakers are trying to say.
The story proper (I am guessing) begins weirdly enough with a pair of golden hands magically boiling up a pot of water. What ensues is a long-form mishmash of figurative images and sequences that vaguely intrigue, and certainly baffle, the viewer. A furtive young man appears during the bridging sequences, who may be acting as witness, along with us viewers. Inside a 19th-century (?) house, a clutch of people (indicated in the credits as “mother”, “daughter”, “uncle”, and so on) interact in strange ways with motives that are impossible to divine. An inspector comes along at some point (again, we know his vocation only from the credits) and twirls his mustache a lot. Eventually the gang inside the house takes up arms against the “daughter,” driving her outside. Interrupting the action is a pair of (usually naked) young people having quasi-dance-like interactions of joy, terror, and sundry other feelings.
As I’ve hinted in the preceding paragraphs, while there may be a lot going on in the movie, very little of it makes any sense. It would help if I knew what the directors were trying to say, and a commentary would no doubt be illuminating. That said, this presents a problem: any movie that cannot stand up to unsupervised viewing is of dubious merit. If there isn’t clarity, there needs to be a “vibe” of some sort, or at least an ambience. However, The Kingdom of Shadows is too scattered to have such a vibe, and any ambience is sabotaged by incoherent or careless touches. To support the latter, I give the example of a slow-moving “pursuit” scene through one of the house’s corridors. The turn-of-the-last-century feel is utterly destroyed by a very obvious smoke detector on the wall. Its square plastic frame and glowing electric light immediately crush whatever mood may have been built.
I have no doubt that all those involved poured their hearts and souls into making this movie, so it pains me a little to have to be so down on it. After the sturm und drang of various troubled moans from the young observer, after the not-quite balletic artiness of the “Adam and Eve” vignettes, and after the cranked up symbolism, we’re still left with something that’s a bit amateurish and more than a bit boring. If there were an unhealthy halfway point between How the Sky Will Melt and Begotten, this movie hits it, and hits it hard. E. Elias Merhige‘s piece—while perhaps incomprehensible—has that dream-like “thing” required for such an exercise in post-narrative film. That “thing” is never found by the directors of The Kingdom of Shadows, which is more the pity.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
The film begins with a myriad of colors across the screen, and a voice inviting the audience to join in on an exploration—a dream—through which the voice informs the audience, “we can go anywhere, see anything”. The colors coalesce into two faces, Gretchen and Margarita, and from here on they function as guides/proxies for the audience, as they move forward into adventure: an adventure of form and format, rather than any sort of plot or story that has to be followed in the service of ‘business’ or whatever. That is the only ‘savagery’ exhibited by these pair of “savage witches”: the refusal to conform to the typical structure of what we expect when we sit down to watch a film. It is perhaps for this reason that the “savage witches” are burned at the end (besides the fact it provides an exciting ending), and our last glimpse of them is of them resting in state, but even then, they continue to flout our expectations… in contrast to the heroines of Daisies, who are definitely punished at the end for their bad behavior. Of course the attack that the protagonists of the Czech film lead against their society is far more pointed and nastier than Savage Witches. Also, the girls of Witches are not as sexualized as the women in Daisies, who use their erotic appeal as a battle tactic.
Hold Me While I’m Naked is one of the things in life worth living for! In fact, we could say that about a lot of Kuchar films, which are amateur concoctions of melodrama, sci-fi and other Hollywood genres and archetypes with a great sensibility for cinematic spectacle. Hold Me While I Am Naked is an example of unstoppable creativity, the film started with a somewhat more conventional narrative but, after leading lady Donna Kerness pulled out, it became a film about a director who is trying to get his