QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM KARLOVY VARY
Loosely based on the eponymous book by Aleš Palán and Jan Šibík (which consists of eight interviews with people living outside civilisation), Slovak director Miro Remo’s sixth feature film sits somewhere between fiction, autofiction and documentary. Identical Czech twins František and Ondřej Klišík play vaguely fictionalised versions of themselves. They are aged 60, and live the farm life to the full. They have no human company except for each other. The girls lost interest in the heavily-bearded, ageing men a long time ago, upon realising that “separating twins is like breaking a mirror”. A black dog, a rooster and a very expressive bull called Nandy help to provide them with affection and subsistence.
The two men joined an underground resistance movement in the late 1980s, which led to the Velvet Revolution and the end of communism in Czechoslovakia. In a way, their secluded existence is a revolutionary gesture. By living such an eccentric life, they continue to rebel against their society. However, they refrain from making overt political statement. This is a movie about two humans being grappling with mortality, isolation and the occasional challenges that mother nature throws at them.
Franta and Ondra, as they affectionately call each other, grapple with the inevitable repercussions of senescence. Their faces are heavily wrinkled, their bellies saggy, and their physical strength no longer the same. Ondra struggles to carry a wooden board across the wind. Franta lost his right arm just below the elbow to a sawmill years earlier, making him even more vulnerable. These challenges don’t prevent the twins from enjoying life. They laugh, smoke, drink coffee and even arm wrestle (with Franta’s amputation, even).
The imagery is of exceptional beauty. The forests surrounding the precarious farm are verdant and genuinely exuberant. The interior scenes are captured with Tarkovsky-esque confidence. The brothers and animals are filmed with affection, and in their most intimate moments: Ondra is seen naked in the bath, Franta wears his birthday suit on a walk across the rails, and loving Nandy has a taste for grooming Ondra’s beard with his tongue. And death is captured with all of its unforgiving magnificence (Ondra butchers a chicken, the dog kills a mole and then plays with its tiny and lifeless body).. A very large and round mirror provides the proceedings with yet another layer of lyricism and complexity. The whole endeavour feels honest and raw, and never exploitative.
In the film’s most powerful scene, one of the characters meets its maker due to a shocking twist of faith. Ondra ascertains: “there is no death, only life”, as he seeks to make peace with his very only mortality. His devotion to his brother remains unwavering. He refuses the Abel and Cain dichotomy, insisting that both siblings are good and one would never kill the other.
It is not entirely clear how a film can be based on a book and simultaneously have actors playing themselves. This lack of clarity, however, does not compromise the integrity of Better Go Mad in the Wild. Miro Remo did not set out to create a documentary, and the film is not marketed as such. There are no talking heads and no archive footage. The occasional voiceover, narrated by the protagonists themselves, is neither descriptive nor didactic. The visuals, which are signed by the director alongside Dušan Husár, are much closer to the dreamy and metaphysical than to the documental. A film that will stay with you for a long time, for sensory and philosophical reasons alike.
Better Go Mad in the Wild just premiered in the Crystal Globe section of the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
