Avetik ★★★★½

WOW! This must be what “Tarkovsky’s Mirror” and “The color of pomegranates” to their fanboys. Transcending poetry, A world that isn’t ours, that doesn’t exist, but is ONLY existent inside this film. Visuals so powerful that they demand an emotional response from you. Even if you don’t know what that response it. Does this scene make me happy? Sad? Well, none of that, But I do know it felt like being hit, a pure neural impulse that stayed pure and didn’t turn into any feeling.
You can divide this film into 2 “timelines”, the majority of it takes place DIALOGUE FREE in Armenia. Impressionistic flashbacks to childhood and ancestors. It has this Parajanov feeling of being abstract/VERY region specific in its visual motifs. And if having its own laws of physics, Things fly around and move. This segment feels like beauty trying to escape forces of pure evil, fire and destruction.
The other “timeline” is the “present”, where an Armenian filmmaker stays in Berlin. He lives with a woman, and is VERY absorbed in daydreaming, looking through the window and remembering the past, To the point where it infected the present. The grass of Armenia starts to grow in his Berlin home. The woman is left totally alone and lonely. This timeline does have dialogue. And it’s dark, as they talk monotonously about suicide, cadavers, and concentration camps.
Maybe my only flaw with the film is its use of actors, the actors here for a lot of the film are a “prop” in the production design, another element to move around to create the image. Which works really fine in the Armenia segments. But the Berlin dialogue could have used “more”.

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