17/05/2011

Acclaimed young director Kamen Kalev (Eastern Plays [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Kamen Kalev
film profile], finalist of the European Parliament LUX Prize 2009) playfully, utterly surprised Cannes audiences with an exhilarating title in three acts (and three different styles) that is initially full of tension, then introspective and dream-like, and finally downright exuberant.

In the opening scene of The Island [+see also:
trailer
film profile], presented in the Directors' Fortnight, Daneel (Danish actor Thure Lindhardt) listens as a fortune teller explains that the Fool card he picked is an invitation to escape his repressed state by taking a leap into the emptiness before him.

The ensuing realistic Paris-set scenes show us that Daneel is an ambitious young man striving to do (and be) what is expected of him. That includes reluctantly taking a sorely needed holiday to a surprise destination carefully chosen by his sweet French girlfriend Sophie (perfectly embodied by Laetitia Casta, for whom Kalev wrote the part). Thus, the lovely couple lands in Bulgaria.

When she hears Daneel speaking the local language, Sophie gives him priceless bewildered look, the first of many as she discovers she doesn’t really know her partner. Gradually, the movie takes a strange and introspective turn, induced by the forlorn place where Daneel, taking the reins of the trip (as it appears Bulgaria is his native country), decides to take Sophie: the tiny, nearly deserted island to which his orphanage would take him on holidays as a child. (A "half" island from Bulgaria’s "two and a half" islands.)

On the island, the couple’s charming complicity crumbles, which is superbly depicted by the director. For Daneel now openly rejects the artificial perfection he had been seeking, to begin a hallucinatory quest for the identity he lost trying to be all kinds of other personae. As says the half-funny, half-demonic old man who lives on the island and becomes a weird kind of spiritual guide to Daneel. Surrounded by the water and the island’s ancestral trees, Daneel gives in until he is born again.

When this grown-up newborn is finally ready to go back to civilisation (in the most hideous sense of the word) and to Sofia, Sophie has been gone for quite a while, and the child she thought she was expecting in the beginning of the film is now a seven-month bulge in her belly. However, the lovers still have a ways to go before they can be united again.

Not much should be revealed of film’s third, hilarious act, lest we spoil its liberating exuberance. Suffice it to say that Daneel now chooses the various characters he wants to embody, and this very freedom to change who he is at will seems to have become his true identity, whether he plays the fool or a guru before the half-frazzled, half-fascinated viewers of the Bulgarian Big Brother – and the film’s viewers, whom Kalev takes on this ironic trip with undeniable ease and humour.

This beautifully filmed and acted film, which skilfully maintains a slow pace before becoming a highly entertaining whirlwind, masterfully combines a very Eastern European lightness of tone with the kind of dazzling audacity talented, young directors use to ensure they stay on our radar. The hypnosis session is a success: one leaves the room with the widest transfixed smile.

(Translated from French)