Bunissima

You will never know what you can find if you wander into the world of movies and give up for a moment to the Hollywood, “this summer on theathre”, the summer hit, the ultimate action hype with endless get down, get down (with an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice)…
Recommended and more by Romer!can, the movie I am going to talk about, was a hit. At least in the way I saw it.
It’s an amazing mise en scene of the Czech folk tale about a couple that cannot have kids and they make one from a piece of wood. The piece of wood comes to life in the form of a monstrous being that eats a lot and not only “regular” food, variating its carnivore diet from all kinds of animals to human flesh. Including its parents and a whole lot of people.
Even though, the beggining the movie did a great job tricking you into believing that both the man and the woman were going insane - each in its own way - about not being able to have a baby, you soon start to wonder. The father sees new born kids everywhere and this makes you think he has an obsession with kids because he knows he can’t have any. He is the typical corporate of average income, average life, average type of person. With thick glasses and a dull character, he tricks you into believing he is a weak, mindless man. To please his desperate, depressed wife, he carves a fake baby from a tree root. The sterile mother is going crazy, pretending that the carved piece of wood looking like a hideous child - with roots instead of hands and feet - is a real child that needs all the care and attention. She takes out the new unused new born’s clothes and pretends to be pregnant for eight months. After enough expectation, she “gives birth” to their son. The man gives in to the crazy wife’s whimps and plays along, pretending that she is telling the truth. Everyone around them is pleasantly surprised. Friends at work get him drunk celebrating the new born. The neighbors, a regular family, is very helpful and interested. Their child, a school girl, seems to suspect that something was wrong in all the pregnancy-birth-child hypothesis, but since her parents never believe her, she does not feel the urge to communicate with them and does not know enough to help the police. After having eaten two people, the “bad boy” is tied up and locked in a box in the basement by his father. Having seen some suspicios things already, the little girl finds Otik, makes friends with him and tries to feed him. After feeding Otesanek all the food from the family’s fridge, a neighbor and the father and mother of the creature itself (the people literally, and not their fridge contents), she cannot fight the old gardener lady to make justice for all her cabbages eaten by the monstuosity. Just like the folk tale says, the old lady will kill the monster with her hoe.

The epic of the movie itself does not seem much. From a less open perspective, it could look like a trial of validating an old folk tale into cinematography.

Using some interesting methods spiced with some kafkian details (in a moderate amount, only theme-related) translated into cinematography, incomprehension of the reality and incapacity of adaptation to it therefore, the movie captivates both your attention and your imagination. The world becomes a high pressure universe that you can only bear by giving in to admitting your own insanity and denying any rationality. Not only do the characters (except the most ingenuos ones, the mother and father of the little girl) prove these symptoms, but the viewer as well, for a little while (of course, admitting that “insane” for the viewer means accepting the convention of the fiction itself, and that it is not about insanity… well, not totally). Doubt and insanity go together like a glove and a hand. After admitting that it is a fictional world that must be taken as such, both the characters and the viewer want justice, suppression of the disturbance. Only that the justice seems helpless, the little girl is not trustworthy, the parents are just good at making faulty suppositions but never at drawing conclusions, the “parents” are tied up, one to the “motherhood”, the other to his wife beggings and insanity, dissapearances are unexplainable, and, unlike all the action movies, there is no actual justice instance that can discover anything, let alone come with a forensics team and discover all the crime scenes that happened even before the “happy couple” was living there.

Some naive-style scenes get a very good catch on the family and social life, where the parents trying to educate their girl, but can’t prevent her from reading sexual education books, which they consider it is a bad thing, the little girl’s fearful dodges from the father’s occasional blows, the daily meals that have no glow but yet seem so appealing, challenging a nostalgy about times when food was simple and untouched by modern pre-made rich fat hype, with the exuberant and overwhelming willing to help of the neighbors, an octogenary pedophile that almost has a heart attack when he sees the little girl’s panties when she is stealing a glance through the “parent’s” key hole, and the daily conjugal life in a building where everyone knows or wants to know something about everyone, picture a very lively surreal mural about modern society in its common sizes.

The mix of childhood-like feelings, self justice, living in a world of tales, wishes, and the modern society contrast and irony, loneliness, threat of pedophily, crime, indolent justice, where the new values are defined by consumerism, advertising, greed, rotten family ties and loss of one’s self, subtle parody of modern society, shows ultimately that you cannot live without a bit of fantasy but that the reality will always be there as a reason to put you down to the ground and cry, because you realize that little “Otik” is an illusion.