Flights of Reality

The title, written as a paraphrase of the famous, even cult in its time, film by Roman Balayan, “Flights of Fancy” (“Polyoty vo sne i nayavu”, 1983), has stopped me for a while: how many present cinema goers will understand it, and shouldn’t I present that film: after all, a generation has grown up without it? However, concerning the film by Kristijonas Vildžiūnas, “You Am I”, it would be difficult to avoid memories about that several decades old cinematography, which the Lithuanian director grew up with.

Therefore: Balayan’s film had a structure more difficult to grasp, and it recorded, almost in a documentary manner (as much as there could be any documentary manner in the aesthetics of Soviet cinematography), the attempts of a 35 – 40 years old man, performed by Oleg Yankovski, to subdue his various spiritual crises (and, in fact, just one – the middle age and being without his own place crisis); to subdue them by running, as we would say today, from one stress into another. From his lover to his ex-lover, from drinking to a celebration in the country, to pretence and the role of a permanent joker intended for everybody, but most of all, and the bitterest, for himself.

Thus, after twenty years, Baron performed by Andrius Bialobžeskis is the same Yankovski’s hero, but now running decisively from the urban civilisation based on pretence to the peace of nature. This resolution is enviable, and even secondary shots become very important: Baron climbs off his strange bicycle and walks on the roadside simply in order to look at a lake. He allows himself a luxury not to pay attention to other people’s gazes and ‘accepted’ etiquette and does what he wants to do and immediately. The whole film as well as Baron’s actions and feelings turn, in fact, around these two poles: civilisation and nature, more precisely, from civilisation towards nature. And not only through the action shown in the film, but also through inner plots in episodes, remarks to the masters of cinema, declarations of love to certain films that, compared to contemporary film advertisement filled with explosive contents, are simply modest cinematographic events able to overturn the soul of the one who watches them.

For instance, Baron’s visit to his ex-lover. She is an artist up to her painted undernails, smoking hubble-bubble pretentiously and demonstrating her art and laughter, perhaps even performed by the actress not very well. However, she fits perfectly here as an echo of Baron’s past, filled with artificiality: telling quite enough about his own compromises with himself. Her emphasised and repetitive laughter is so artificial that it rasps the nerves, but at the same time it is a reference to Lithuanian cinematography of the 1960s – 1970s with its portraits of femmes fatales (Bajorytė, Balandytė, Žebertavičiūtė) and demonstrative acting that flourished in that cinematography, which we regard positively only out of nostalgia or as a standard of the time.

This is the last point on Baronas’s road towards escape. After that he improvises his own death as if just for himself: he lies down into a waiting grave, relaxes for a while, and an aboriginal man emerging in his visions (fortunately, not too often) declares in a poster-like manner: “Death cures”. Just like that, a funny play with visions, but, perhaps, also a reference to final shots of Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry” where a man is lying in a grave and longing to die.

The film is ruptured, its runs in dotted lines and avoids exemplary consistency: we do not see the farewell to the lover, we do not see where and when Baron bought utensils for his house, that the night passed and now a new day has started. Vildžiūnas composes the film like a theorem: something is given and something is an undisputable condition. Such are the rules, and editing has been strict here: any reality of the world left behind might impair, first of all, the rhythm of the film. However, the shots between breaking parts are very important to him. A closed wooden lid on the toilet is replaced with a wooden oar from a boat. The connecting part between these shots is the matter, the sound and the colour protecting the integrity of the whole film. And also a very important, as if perceived physically, surface of things. Later on one will be almost able to touch the surface of things: the torn linen suit of a starting writer or a book from his rough white paper.

‘Given’ is Baron himself. We learn very little about him, but nothing more is needed. He was an architect, used to work under commissions; he got bored, crises, perhaps, wives, children (he does not have them, there is a standard perception), dropped everything, ran away and built a house in a tree. Baronas lives in a tree, but nothing else in common or will be in common with Italo Calvino’s novel. There will not be anything in common with nearly anybody because Andrius Bialobžeskis creates ‘a thing in itself’, and his concentration is, at the same time, unknowable to the viewer. However, he is not a boring monument, but very alive and professes concentration and not withdrawal, He is very alive, pronouncing ‘to have fun’ with hardly perceptible irony, willingly and very quietly communicating with people he does not know. The open gaze, calm trust and inner harmony are enough to believe him, and this is a very interesting actor’s presence-state-of-mind in the film. It is impossible to know his inner being; you are free to create him apart from the structural parts: escaping from artificiality, now protecting himself in the natural environment, constructing such a house so as to make himself almost invisible (the walls are of glass), taking electricity from a generator plunged into a rapid stream, cooking vegetable soup. Pure ecology, but this word here is another principle on which this film and the role are based. “You Am I” speaks of cleanliness, ecology of the inner world, ‘consumption’ of oneself and others without residues and waste.

The forest is not an environment, but another, very impressive, partner of his. The director listens to it, observes it like Baron teaching us to feel the warmth of a tree. Wind, water, flowing plants: a cinefile would not restrain from mentioning Tarkovsky, but I would have to contradict him essentially: those shots by Tarkovsky would not exist without forest and wind. To follow only cultural associations is not important for Vildžiūnas, and they emerge for the viewer according to his cultural ‘rottenness’; on the other hand, they essentially contradict the declared Rousseauist slogan: ‘Back to nature!’.

Others also yield to the call of nature, but slightly differently. Nature is like an abstraction. A pack of contemporary fluorescing high-heeled young people gathering in a country house is not treated ironically. The dramas are too minuscule for the director to focus longer on them. And I would rather suspect that the actors act slightly demonstratively, not so convincingly, but their movements and laughter are sufficient to the director. And just starting conversations, fortunately, break off soon, because immediately one can sense the old disease of Lithuanian cinematography: the inability to write dialogues. Beside that, the director does not need the young people’s inner lives and psychologisation; they are here to radiate an external professed joy. A lengthy birthday reveals nothing, apart from slight boredom; ‘grass’ is as necessary a demonstrational attribute as traditional torches around the fire. Here nothing will unfold, and the birthday will not become some kind of culmination. (Another cinematographic digression: the hero of Šarūnas Bartas’s “Seven Invisible Men” was escaping to nature, which turned into a wild boozing and tearing one’s soul. Here, on the contrary, the skin on their souls has not grown yet and is not strong enough, or scarred, to tear it)

Dominyka’s birthday (she is standing closest to nature) changes little: her friend finishes the story. This, I guess, should sound to him (I don’t know, perhaps, even to the director) not worse than allegories related by the characters of Wayne Wang’s “Smoke”, however, it turns into slightly banal writing. However, Vildžiūnas deals also with her by justifying the colourfulness of the Crimean coast, with the help of the same literature and, perhaps, through the flights of Dominyka’s fantasies: oh, they are climbing the mountains; oh, he is dead, and she runs, kisses him, he comes alive and they both go – back to Lithuanian outer woods.

The birthday celebration is essentially peaceful; we observe it with Baron’s eyes. Observing everything lightly, admiring Dominyka without a drama. It is simply the anatomy of the gaze recording a woman on the beach described by Greimas in his essay “On Imperfection”: no catharsis, but something has changed. Or differently: Vildžiūnas’s sympathy to a peaceful human presence in summer nature, which has been shown precisely by Eric Rohmer.

This is a film-meditation about cleanliness, about the pursuit of cleanliness and a long-term being clean. Without drama, without culminations: otherwise, one would not be able to meditate. Even if Dominyka does not come to celebrate the New Years Eve, it is not important. After all, the New Year is also artificial, only an arbitrary sign. And at the same time the film is both a philosophical and sociological essay about time, when one starts longing for fundamental existential things and escapes from the enforced life of  a vegetable. First of all, it is important to reach an agreement with oneself, your own flights and dreams. When the vision of the aboriginal man tells Baron: “I am You and You am I,” this precisely means that reconciliation and reached peace. In fact, the director says something else here: “Ho ho, William Blake” from the final shots of “Dead Man” by Jarmusch, and this means the same, as it has been when this vision has appeared for the first time, a journey to There.

However, it is possible not to know all of this and, perhaps, to be cleaner because of this.