girato a Praga, ispirato a Kafka, Josef K. deve restituire qualcosa (o qualcuno) preso a noleggio da un negozio che non esiste più.
uffici, moduli, timbro, file, attese, atmosfere proprio kafkiane.
vedere, per credere, questo piccolo bel film - Ismaele
QUI il film completo (sottotitoli in inglese)
It's a sombre Kafkaesque tale
about a nameless man who happens upon a cat rental agency while wandering the
streets of Prague searching for someone named Joseph Kilian. Of course
the next day when he goes to return his rented feline, he finds the shop is no
longer where it was and none of the passers by can provide any help; and so he
encounters an increasingly complex and impossible bureaucracy in his search for
this missing shop and the elusive Joseph Kilian.
With a beautiful minimalistic style, Jurácek
and Schmidt create a concise and absurdly humorous, biting allegory of life
under the communist regime. Hilarious scenes of the main character
hopelessly lost in a confusing and meandering system of officials and
departments provide much amusement, and makes you truly wonder how a film with
such a politically critical message was allowed to be made under those
conditions.
A wonderfully clever, surreal, and gloomy yet
enjoyable tale, perfect for cat lovers and fans of Eastern European cinema.
da qui
… the comparisons with Kafka immediately stand out, and the
author’s name is so often evoked that it has become a cliche to do so. People
toss around the term “Kafkaesque” to describe almost anything a little bit dark
and weird these days. It’s like when people use the term “Catch-22” without
fully grasping what that means, and you can be bloody sure they haven’t read
the book. Could I say that the term has become so over-used that I’ve decided
to write the whole review without mentioning the writer’s name or the adjective
derived from it? It’s a bit weak, I think, but it’s all I’ve got right now. So
let’s give it a whirl:
At first glance, Juráček & Schmidt’s mischievous
short film invites comparisons with a certain famous Prague writer, right down
to the initials of the title character. Yet, while there is an obvious debt of
gratitude to the totemic novelist whose intense face can be found on a thousand
Prague gift shop mugs, the film feels more like a confluence of influences,
from Escher to Samuel Beckett.
Our protagonist is Jan Herold (Karel Vašíček), a man
wandering the streets of Prague looking for comrade Kilian. He is met with
confused looks whenever he asks people if they have seen him, as no-one seems
to have heard of the guy. As he continues his search he stumbles upon a Cat
Rental shop (yes, you read that right) and decides that he may as well rent a
cat.
He carries on looking for the mysterious Kilian,
carrying the cat in a bag. When the time comes to return the cat, the shop is
no longer there. What’s more, the building looks like it has been unoccupied
for many years, and passersby can’t recall ever seeing a cat rental place in
the vicinity. So, with the cat now potentially incurring late fees, Herold
continues his search for the eponymous character…
Herold’s meanders through a strange somnambulistic
atmosphere, a little like Herk Harvey’s eerie Carnival
of Souls. While the premise of a cat rental shop is absurd, this idea lulls
you into a false sense of security. The smile it raises is smothered by the
disquieting ambience of the half-empty Prague streets, populated by people
caught in a trancelike state who don’t really remember anything or recognise
anyone.
The directors use bold editing techniques to emphasise
the sense of dislocation and unease. They use jarring match-cuts to show Herold
in one place then suddenly appearing in another, sometimes chopping our
protagonist through several scenes in a matter of seconds. They also tinker
with aggressive cuts that made me think my copy was faulty before I realised it
was intentional, and also a bit of forward-and-reverse motion tomfoolery with
little effect.
These editing choices creates a disorienting
environment where people and places vanish and citizens are trapped in strange
Escher-like time loops. A dusty passageway is filled with placards bearing
Communist slogans that hint at the fate that has befallen the city. It is a
place where people have become unmoored from time and space.
Both directors would make feature-length films,
with Juráček contributing a key title of the New Wave, Case for A Rookie Hangman. Joseph
Kilian was their debut effort, and it shows. It is beautifully
shot and features some striking imagery but its sense of strangeness and
foreboding quickly evaporates once it is over. It is like a movie put together
by two precocious magpies with clear filmmaking talent, but haven’t developed
their ideas enough to make them stick. It’s all surface flash without much to
underpin it, making the film feel as fleeting and transient as the protagonist.
At this point, I realise that the idea of not
mentioning Kafka by name is a bit of a non-starter. I only really needed to
refer to him in the first paragraph, and straight away I was relieved – there
are only so many ways of not referring to someone by name. If
I had to carry on, I could see myself dipping into the Wikipedia article on the
novelist and pulling out facts to use in place of his name – the prolific
writer whose works were posthumously saved by his good friend Max Brod;
Prague’s second-most legendary Jewish resident after Rabbi Loew; and so on.
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