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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: Absurdistan

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#1 of 1 Posted 3/20/09 2:48 PM

From harveykarten Posts 764 Last Dec-19
To All [Msg # 23775.1 ]

ABSURDISTAN

First Run Pictures
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: B+
Directed by: Veit Helmer
Written By: Veit Helmer, Zaza Buadze, Gordan Mihic, Ahmet Golbol
Cast: Maximilian Mauff, Kristyna Malerova, Assign Planes, Annie Amiridze, Suzann Petricevic
Screened at: Critics’ DVD, NYC, 3/7/09
Opens: February 6, 2009 at Landmark Nuart, Los Angeles

Borat Sagdiyev meets Tevya the Milkman in a surreal tale that could have come from the pen of Isaac Bashevis Singer or Sacha Baron Cohen. A tiny village high up in the mountains of Azerbaijan and Georgia is both spoofed and saluted in this near-silent, Russian dialogued comedy with English subtitles. “Absurdistan,” which might have been inspired by Aristphanes’ play “Lysistata,” deals with a place so remote, so unmapped, that Osama Bin Laden would not have trouble hiding out there right out in the open. In fact “Absurdistan” is so unnoticed that despite the presence of working phone lines, there is nobody anywhere that can help with the town’s two big problems. The first dilemma is that the water no longer flows into that desiccated land. Women line up with pitchers by the town’s only pipeline to no avail. The second problem is that the men are unable to have sex with their wives (or others) because the females, of various ages and avoirdupois, have gone on strike, blaming the guys for being so lazy and inept that they have no idea how to make the village wet again.

There are only two teens in the film as presumably the other young people have gone to make their fortune in Tiblis or Baku. The oldest of the citizenry is a fortune teller (Gisela Frisch) who counsels young Aya (Kristyna Malerova) that she and her long-term boyfriend Temelko (Maximilian Mauff) will be able to “join together” on July 11th—but the kicker is that they have to wait four years when they will be eighteen and even then only during the six days that the stars will allow their bond.

Like the gals in “Lysistrata”—in a village that might have come out of ancient times of that play—the women deny their husbands by keeping rifles and butcher knives in bed, though they up the ante by stringing Main Street with barbed wire, doubly enforcing the resistance with their rifles.

Since nothing motivates like sex, Temelko digs and scrounges around the area to find a way to trap the clear liquid, more valuable than oil, while remembering his promise to make Aya fly. (That promise is not only metaphorical as we see in the opening scenes, which then flash back to the story.)

You can’t make a movie nowadays without guns, but here the firearms are strictly for fun as is the entire picture. The appropriately named director Veit Helmer had offered us “Tuvalu” in 1999, which deals as well with a desolate village, but there a man has to find a way to get a bathhouse OKd by inspectors. “Absurdistan” would seem to place Herr Helmer on a similar road.

Unrated. 84 minutes 10 seconds. © 2009 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: Absurdistan

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