Russia (bbabo.net), - The Austrian film "Hinterland: Sin City" is an unexpected and, I must say, a great example of how the style of German expressionism belonging to history works today, - the visual solution of the painting by Stefan Ruzowitzky makes it a must-see any cinemaman.
Stefan Ruzowitzky, the Oscar winner who won the 2007 film The Counterfeiters, is here again a master of the original, working with powerful, confident strokes. The action takes place after the First World War in 1920; a group of soldiers and officers of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire returns from Russian captivity to Vienna.
Among them is Peter Perg, a former successful forensic detective. For two years of captivity, their homeland has changed beyond recognition: its former power and splendor have evaporated without a trace, now it is just a small country on the map of war-torn Europe. Perg himself is not the same anymore: a face disfigured by a shell shock, an extinct look, nightmares, a clouded consciousness makes everything around deformed, alien, hostile. The magnetic image, created by the Austrian actor of Turkish origin Muratan Muslu, from the first frame sets the tone of something hopelessly dehumanized for the whole picture: war, like the new Frankenstein, turns the human world into a gathering of gloomy, ready-made monsters.
The film draws the viewer frame into this gloomy, almost monochrome world of post-war devastation and chaos. Vienna looks like a palisade of factory chimneys set at random, it oppresses with corridors of dark streets, its warped buildings without right angles and verticals compress people into a randomly scurrying, screaming crowd, dark alleys are fraught with danger. The expressionism of the artist Uli Simon is continued in the work of cinematographer Benedict Neuenfels: always unexpected, painfully "abnormal" angles, the picture is distorted by optics, and when the camera breaks through this crowd, the panorama of faces will remind you of Goya's capricos or even Bosch's nightmares. The city of palaces and cathedrals appears as an ominous theater, where in the foreground, close-up, the road is continually crossed - as if downstage - by businesslike burghers from the theatrical extras.
And in this entourage we become witnesses of successive murders. One, fellow soldiers of Perg die, the murders are carried out with some diabolical ingenuity: someone is nailed to the fence in the manner of St. Sebastian, nineteen lacerated wounds are clearly read on the body; someone is dismembered and frozen in nineteen blocks of ice, nineteen of their twenty fingers and toes are chopped off... Berg will have to remember his former profession, and at the same time discover a lot of new things in his former friends, colleagues, colleagues police.
In this picture, everything seems inconsistent. Death itself is humiliated, trampled into the mud of the road. Faith is outraged, and the hero furiously urinates on the altar of the majestic cathedral. Fragile, airy, poetic Teresa Kerner, with whom Perg develops a strange platonic relationship, is a pathologist by profession, coolly examines mangled bodies (the work of the beautiful Liv Lisa Fries, refined, built on contrasts).
If the visual solution of the film makes one think of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Wiene and other masterpieces of German expressionism, then the ritual number 19 and some features of the plot frame are about thrillers like Seven by David Fincher or The Third Man by Carol Reed. The development of the action is leisurely, but tense; the painful atmosphere of the film, full of secrets, the unpredictability of events provide a virtuoso balance between exquisitely infernal arthouse and commercial thriller that can capture the viewer's imagination. It is, as it were, the very embodiment of the ugliness and nightmares of war. A stunningly powerful image of the world crippled by it, seen as if from inside this world through its mercilessly sharp, distorting optics, is the main thing that remains after watching this film. Mysteriously sounding for the Russian ear "Hinterland" is not the name of an unknown "city of sins", but, literally, "inner earth" - the inner world of an incurably ill consciousness, wounded by war.
bbabo.Net