A road movie set in present day Bulgaria, a country remains optimistic,
mainly because all the realists and pessimists have left.
Posoki (2017)
Director:
Stephan KomandarevStars:
A road movie set in present day Bulgaria, a country remains optimistic,
mainly because all the realists and pessimists have left. At a meeting
with his banker, a small business owner, who drives a cab to make ends
meet, discovers the bribe he will have to pay to get a loan has doubled.
The ethics board that reviewed his complaint about extortion now wants
its share of the action. At his wit's end, he shoots the banker and then
himself. The incident sparks national debate on talk radio about how
despair has taken over civil society. Meanwhile, six taxi drivers and
their passengers move through the night, each in hope of finding a
brighter way forward.
Bulgarian writer-director Stephan Komandarev’s best-known previous
films — such as the widely travelled 2008 intergenerational
Oscar-submission The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner and 2014’s border-set drama The Judgment — have put the issues of immigration and emigration right at the heart of their stories. With his latest, Directions,
which screened in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, that theme is once
again present, but Komandarev this time focuses more closely on the
tortured soul of Bulgarians who haven’t left their native land, or at
least not yet. A criss-crossing narrative that hops from taxi to taxi
over the course of roughly a day and night, this plays more like a
series of shorts of variable quality rather than a coherent whole.
Still, Komandarev’s empathy for people struggling to survive as best
they can is palpable and admirable. The film could have appeal on the
festival circuit like the director’s earlier work, even though viewers
will come away with a very vivid, specific portrait of contemporary
Sofia in all its seedy splendor.
The first, instigating vignette is in some ways the best one. After
dropping off his 12-year-old daughter (the director’s own kid, Anna
Komandareva) at school, small businessman Misho (Vassil Vassilev-Zuek),
who drives a taxi to earn extra cash, picks up another teenager
(Borislava Stratieva), who turns out to be moonlighting herself as a
prostitute. He argues with her about her life choices, and takes her
back to school before going on to meet the dead-eyed banker Popov
(Georgi Kadurin) with whom Misho has dealings. Angry that Misho has
complained about Popov’s corruption, Popov puts the squeeze on him for
more money; otherwise he’ll have all of Misho’s assets seized. At the
end of his tether, Misho shoots Popov dead and then turns the gun on
himself, managing to put himself in a coma.
The following stories are tied together by the fact that they, too,
all take place in taxis, and as the evening wears on, in each car the
drivers listen to a local talk-radio station where callers take up a
variety of positions about Misho’s shooting of Popov, with some decrying
his criminality and others hailing him a hero. Poor Misho, however, is
clearly doomed because in the second self-contained segment, female
cabbie Rada (Irini Zhambonas) picks up the heart surgeon who is en route
to the hospital to perform a transplant, moving Misho’s heart into that
of an unemployed baker. On the way, Rada and he discuss how
dysfunctional the country has become, and how much the surgeon is
looking forward to leaving to take up a new job in Hamburg.
The subject comes up often during the various subsequent taxi rides.
Some viewers may wonder why Bulgarian cabbies never make small talk and
just talk about football or the weather, but as drama it's fitfully
effective. One of the more effective sequences centers around driver
Zhoro (Assen Blatechki) as he tries to talk schoolteacher Petar (Troyan
Gogov) out of throwing himself off a bridge. Elsewhere, scenes involving
sad-sack Kosta (Vasil Banov), an older man whose son has just died and
ends up pouring out his woe to a stray dog, are a little too obvious and
melodramatic, as is a credulity-stretching revenge story involving Rada
picking up someone from her past.
What is quite impressive is how clear the imagery is given it was
shot on a handheld camera inside the various taxis used with no obvious
additional lighting, taking advantage of the new Arri Alexa mini camera
to capture the action under what must be challenging conditions for a
cinematographer. (Arri is one of the film’s key producers.) So as a
showreel of what the camera can do, this does the trick even if the
car-ride-stories setup is a bit too familiar as a device, used by Jim
Jarmusch, Abbas Kiarostami and others to more impressive effect.
OUT OF COMPETITION
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