Veit Helmer
Absurdistan

Even though the allure of this cinematic work by Veit Helmer brings to mind both, in the theatrical field and for theme development, Aristophanes' “Lysistrata” and, in much more recent times and for art much more common to filmgoers, “Where Do We Go Now?” the 2011 movie by Nadine Labaki, in fact, I intend to compare it to something else.

The story of Aya and Temelko, their conflicted love and then magically happy conclusion, echoes in the atmosphere of two precious objects that probably won't mean much to average moviegoers. The two directors to be called into question are Nana Dzhordzhadze and Bakhtyar Khodujnazarov. The wonders I recommend you learn before diving into the viewing of this peculiar 'hybrid' comedy (and soon I'll tell you why I use this term) are obviously “27 Missing Kisses” from 2000 and “Luna Papa” from the year before. From the first film, Helmer heavily borrows for many passages of “Absurdistan” that Eastern European milieu made of an aridity imbued with hope-filled fertility, a sort of erotic-geographical magnet that immediately taps into base instinct to ultimately declare the hegemony of the joyful spirit. From Khodujnazarov's masterpiece, there's much in the theatrical sting with which some characters' caricatures are painted, an anarchic sense of suspension of all human gravity in the enchantment; there, it was a 'road movie' running along the dusty rails of a reparative marriage, shaking theatrical papier-mâché and shattering small provincial lies, here instead everything moves towards a primal return to the rite of the motherland. There, the journey was in the coordinates (latitudes and longitudes of poetic substance) of feelings and love rules, here in the empathic drilling of a desert that desert truly is not. Here, we delve into the flesh of the world, there we caressed the vertebrae of affection.

Helmer – in my opinion – catches two birds with one stone; he sends a message in many visual fragments of Hollywood form, organized as comic summaries somewhat manicheistically, lived and visited by 'masks' who now impersonate boldness and then cowardice, now stupidity and then sensuality of man. But he also entrusts his cinematic form with a long list of clichés (common for sure, but also worthy of new revisitation) that belong to the classic and beguiling comedy of Ptushko or Paradjanov, the happy popular intensity of some works by the Chukhrai-Mironov duo, the sense of musical paradox (because it is music for images, yes indeed, that it is) of some formal solutions of the early Iosseliani. So Helmer skirts, often with a sure hand and sometimes with overly evident naivety, the Western 'mainstream' and the 'auteur-ship' of much Russian cinema; he conjures a rivulet of bright water, his 'filmmaking' perhaps, that can truly achieve the final result of uniting, mixing, saving souls and bodies, hearts and throats. And he does not always succeed. Sometimes due to the urgency of synthesis, other times due to a tired analysis of details and complicated correspondences.

But this film must be watched and savored with great attention. The village has been forgotten by the world; it has never been marked on maps and now, after the great conflicts and the small cruelties of history, it lives its fragile normality. The men have dug the rock of the mountain at a terrible human cost, they have created an aqueduct that allowed the community's life, that decreed balances, that dispensed duties (for the women, who now have to work and satiate the men's desires – often simultaneously!) and rights (for the men who have transformed the tavern into their philosophical club, just as they have dressed their ineptitude with behavior). But time erodes human structures. The water pipeline loses, year after year, its flow, and soon the village finds itself dry. Thus begins a war of the sexes (or for sex) that in truth leads the dance of revolutions, of revolt, and of the new order. The young Temelko has brought with him from the city a suitcase full of showerheads; at first, he is ridiculed for this. His idea of dispensing running water in the houses precisely in the most desperate moment of drought, makes him appear as a foolish boy with no awareness of the world. Just as the carnal love with his beloved Aya seems comically unrealizable. “Your love will be fulfilled only when the Virgin and the Sagittarius meet in the sky,” prophesizes the wise babooska, and the young couple exchange smiling glances. July eleventh is near. “But in four years!” ends the prophecy of the old woman, and despair invades their hearts. Everything seems impossible just as Aya's self-sustained dream of being able to fly (first she undresses on the roof of her house, in one of the film's most beautiful scenes; then Temelko almost satisfies her wish with an invention that smells of winches and lovestruck poetry; then Aya really flies with a homemade rocket that seems like an iconic offspring lying between Méliès and Kusturica!), but everything is eventually accomplished thanks to the driving force of humankind. Women.

“If we yield, if we give them the slightest foothold, there will be no job that they, with their stubbornness, won't succeed in doing. They will build ships, they will want to battle at sea. If they then take to riding horses, it's the end of the knights!” the chorus of old men in Aristophanes' “Lysistrata” compellingly states. And here Aya, the young darling of the women, echoes this, as she confronts and confronts the lined-up men, humiliating them defiantly. “Where are the men with this legendary reputation? I don’t see them. All I see is a miserable band of good-for-nothings infesting the village, too cowardly to take matters into their own hands!” These are her words before Temelko, from within the womb of the motherland, finds a way to bring the water of life into the bare stones of the village.