Life Without Gabriella Ferri Movie Review
Priit Pärn Directs 2-D Computer Animated Film for Eesti Joonisfilm
Oct 17, 2009
Art is often a window to the soul. What can you glean about Tim Burton from watching visions of shattered innocence in Sweeney Todd, Corpse Bride or Edward Scissorhands? What is Andrew Stanton trying to say about the nature of love in his epic quest movies like Finding Nemo or WALL-E? And what attracts Canadian animator Chris Landreth ('Ryan,' 'The Spine') to the broken failures in his films? Art speaks to an audience about its creator in ways he or she may never have imagined.
What then to make of a film like Elu ilma Gabriella Ferrita (Life Without Gabriella Ferri), the latest from Estonian animator Priit Pärn? This exercise in interminable abstraction – laced with misogynistic overtones – received no applause or appreciation from its audience of fellow animators when it screened at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Despite the movie's 44-minute running time, several moviegoers walked out mid-screening, disgusted with what played onscreen.
Priit and Olga Pärn Direct Elu ilma Gabriella Ferrita (Life Without Gabriella Ferri)
A mortally wounded stork slowly falls to earth. A young couple tries to make love while filleting a fish, their attempts at seduction stymied by a little boy continuously slamming his head against a wall. A pair of virtual prostitutes offer their wares while conducting a subtle game of one-upmanship. A spider crawls on naked, bound flesh, creating arousal. A faceless thug makes his way through the town, stealing as he goes, making his inexorable way towards the couple's apartment.
And those are the coherent bits. The flick jumps between storylines like a frog on a hot rock, switching between various scenarios until the viewer is confused by the jumble of images onscreen. Character development? Motivation? All such mundane concerns are lost beneath the welter of confusion, until apathy and boredom set in. Why bother caring when Pärn refuses to give anything to the audience?
In addition, the film revels in its ugliness. "Don't jump! Life is nice!" a man tells a suicidal person, shortly before being stabbed by a falling stork. Another rams a pencil through his hand so he can manipulate a laptop. Were these, and other sequences, supposed to be black comedy? No one laughed.
But what truly pulls Elu ilma Gabriella Ferrita into the realm of the offensive is its depiction of women. Females are divided into two categories here: angel or whore. Indeed, the "angel" of the piece – who frugs to her internal music while hanging lost items on a nearby clothesline – flashes her naked breasts at a man trying to make his way back to his wife. Does she know that he's with someone else, or does she not care? Why is she attracted to him, other than simply because the script tells her so? The film doesn't say.
A woman leaves her husband for another man, without seeming rhyme or reason. What was lacking in their relationship that she decides to do this? The movie never explains: it is apparently sufficient for Pärn to tell us that females are inconstant, ready to drop their mates when a seemingly superior specimen comes calling.
Given Pärn's lack of character development, it's up to the audience to add 6 and 7 together. And the result is an unattractive sum.
The Final Analysis
There's nothing wrong with making an abstract film: plenty of movies have divorced themselves from conventional reality with stunning results. Seemingly pointless films have a resonance all their own: a Rorschach blot that speaks its own individual message to the viewer. And no one said that movie watching has to be a pleasant experience.
But it's that rare moviegoer that will tolerate a film that combines all three elements, and it's an even rarer moviegoer that will find something appealing in this interminable exercise in misery and misogyny.
Elu ilma Gabriella Ferrita (Life Without Gabriella Ferri) gets a 2/10.
 |
