QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Nearly 20 years after Rasmus Merivoo’s 22-minute short film, Alien – Saving Valdis in 11 Chapters (2006), the director decided to indulge and make its sequel, Alien 2 or The Return of Vladis in 17 Chapters at around five times the runtime of its predecessor

As the title says, Valdis (Märt Avandi) is back, and of course, he’s butt naked. Unlike others that have gone on an unexpected trip into space, Valdis hasn’t forgotten anything, nor has his appetite for burgers and sex diminished. The folk of his home village are surprised to see him back, and things have changed while he has been gone – the men are now controlled by the women. But the return of the ultimate alpha-male may signal that the village will be switching things back to how they used to be.

The stirring and thundering orchestration of Sergei Prokofiev’s The Dance of the Knights opens Merivoo’s raucous sci-fi comedy. And raucous it is – people vomit on one another, a full-on group orgy breaks out and there’s plenty of non-discriminatory gender violence. It may not only be Prokofiev rolling uneasily in the grave, but any number of classical composers, including Ludwig Van Beethoven, Edvard Grieg and Antonio Vivaldi, whose music has been appropriated for this irreverent Estonian bender. Merivoo’s provocative mix of high and low art, however, may be the thing that’s least likely to offend or annoy audiences.

Merivoo doesn’t hold back, and in the first chapters there are crude jokes about oral sex and swinging/sexual experimentation, which set expectations for what’s to come. What Merivoo either refused to acknowledge or was unaware of, is how the anthology film traditionally struggles with consistency. Across Alien 2’s seventeen chapters, Merivoo puts himself in an unenvious position – one he’s unable to escape.

The film quickly becomes a grind, struggling under the demands of its 100-minute run time. In hindsight, Merivoo’s indulgence is inexplicable, and it will divide the audience further. Only the hard-core fans of this type of gross and crude humour will be able to withstand it. The Valdis story and its antics are representative of a certain type of irreverent comedy popular in the 2000s. Watching Alien 2, it felt a little like stepping into a time machine and travelling to the 2000s.

Alien 2 is a deeply provocative work that progressive society can only interpret as a massive “f**k you”! Merivoo, however, isn’t interested in making political films, but Alien 2’s sexism may have dragged him and his film into the political arena. It’s difficult not to see the film as massaging the masculine ego, while demonising empowered women that amounts to a vicious gut punch.

Merivoo must want to be dragged into conversations that are inevitably political, otherwise why depict gender in the way he does, and unleash such violence against women? Unless he isn’t interested in politics, only in stirring up trouble and triggering outrage.

Alien 2 or The Return of Vladis in 17 Chapters just premiered in the Rebels with a Cause section of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.