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.
Review of Field of Dogs
