QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Tnless you’re from Eastern Europe, there is a good chance you don’t know that Lithuania shares a border with Russia on the east – as do more Eastern European countries than would like to – and also on the west. It’s a small enclave of Russia called the Kaliningrad Oblast. That’s one of the world’s most interesting geographical phenomena: a giant sand dune spit, divides the two countries on the western edge. That border, even more so than the one on the east, divides the European Union from their biggest enemy. This is a liminal divide – a space between spaces that doesn’t quite make sense. It also makes a compelling setting for Lithuanian director Ignas Jonynas’s latest crime-thriller Borderline.
Set in the small border town of Rusnė, Borderline embraces local culture through fishing and bird watching – two of the activities the city is most known for. Vilius (Šarūnas Zenkevičius), an ornithologist still mourning the loss of his departed wife, gets unintentionally drawn into a border-crossing crime syndicate. He does his best and uses his day job of tracking migration patterns and saving trapped birds (along with the van and tracking equipment that come with the job) in order to alleviate the difficulties of his new crime life. His daughter (Urtė Povilauskaitė) doesn’t talk and experiences life with some mental disabilities, and Vilius’s new life on the edge makes him reevaluate what’s important to him and brings him closer to his daughter.
The border checkpoint ends up being vital to the criminal enterprise. A border agent helps them get away with their legal transgressions. The first checkpoint is tense before it becomes almost satirical with the egregious misgivings the patrol person (Viktoras Bachmetjevas) allows to pass with full knowledge. They are in on the developments, of course, thus literally implicating the geographical border. It becomes a partner in the visuals of crime and represents, in one way or another, the danger of sharing a border with Russia. The complexities of geography are difficult to visualise, but Jonynas does so with ease and expertise.
One of the most interesting characters is the androgynous crime boss Vanda played by Danguolė Beinarytė. She is terrifying in a way that requires more than a well-written part. Her deliveries come with power and confidence, and her large frame often squeezes others out of the centre of the frame, as if she is always the most significant person in the room. One of the most tense scenes takes place over a drink between Vilius and Vanda, seated at a table. She is much larger than him, and the cinematography heightens this disparity with an appropriate lens choice that seems to shrink the volume of the room. He slouches in his chair while she stands straight-laced in hers: the eyeline between the actors visualises the power disparity between crime lord and lowly minion. Between them, a painting of the Last Supper adds a biblical urgency to their meal. Will there be backstabbing? Death? Religious awakening?
Like the birds he rescues, Vilius is stuck between captivity and freedom. Jonynas is hesitant to ever be too obvious about any avian metaphor to the point that the metaphor itself feels like a stretch at times. Other times, it’s impossible to miss, as when live (rescued) birds and a dead human body share space in the back of his van. Maybe many will prefer the way the metaphor stunts itself, but I thought it hindered the thematic momentum around freedom and guilt.
The dead-wife thread never comes full circle. It’s more of a narrative device to make Vilius empathetic before he descends into a dark world of murder, drugs, and other illegalities. Since he starts as a somewhat distant father, perhaps, if we are to be super generous, his dead wife buys moral patience from otherwise morally strict viewers…I’m not sure I’m that generous, though. Borderline is at its least interesting when it’s stuck on Vilius’s underacted grief.
Borderline just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
