But we have forgotten that only a word shines in the midst of earthly anxieties. Impossible time. I will give half the kingdom for the word.
Maria Hamzina
This is an ordinary and magical forest. Such usually unusual people: a captured girl; two men ready to fight for her with a cannibal; his wife, helping the brave. All four are physically free, but have fallen into bondage. A miracle hasn't happened yet, and his foreboding is already in the air - as Green always does. Without inventing anything new, using archetypal plots and images, he immediately breaks them with unsurpassed humor. Can princesses be so fickle? Virgos from the chapel not once change their heart attachments. Is it customary to empathize with the relatives of fabulous villains? The strict appearance of the cannibal’s wife in heavy red velvet with sad eyes stirs the soul not only of the Lion Cavalier. Someone resents the artificiality and theatricality of Green’s staged approach, and someone does not consider his manner shameful, because our life is a playground, a theater, “one wandering shadow, a pathetic actor who boasts for some hour on stage, and there goes missing.”
The actors of the Living World are guests not from the future, but from the past, partly borrowed from chivalric novels and epic poems, partly from the Thirty Kingdom, the thirtieth state. One of them took a fire with him, the others did not return home from the forest, the third sits for endless knitting for those who have long loved and waited. It seems that on the way to the location of the shooting, all the characters completely mixed up with each other (“While Penelope knitted socks, dissolving them again every night, on that bank of the fleeting river Odysseus met Nausicaa.” Nausicaa said to him, "Odysseus!" Return is only a half-measure. Stay with me, be the two of you more fun. We honor each other with Homer...". And, in addition, lost armor and armor, so the props had to act according to the method of a limited in the capabilities of the person who “blinded his hero from what was”: equip them with jeans, sham swords and put on a donkey instead of a zealous horse. But, of course, this is no incident: oversaturated with reminiscences couterma is subject to the strictest order and thought out in advance.
The Living World is a story as simple as a clay vessel and as deep as the Tau Ton mine. Transparent, like a plastic raincoat, and ornate, like an oriental compliment. Simple as a child's eye, and pretentious as Flemish lace. If anyone but Eugene Green made such a film, moving from the north pole of meaning to the south would grind the viewer to death. But Greene is allowed to do anything. Love music from rock to ba-rocco. To deplete the intonations of the actors to avoid playfulness, and unfold the action in the form of a stage performance. Joking while preaching serious things. To build high-flown dialogues, supplementing them with naive remarks. The addiction to baroque art predetermines the inconsistency of his paintings, but it also brings to them a note of charming strangeness, and a unique charm. Only in him the dead come to life, the emptiness is filled, indifference retreats before love, and sleep with reality and even go hand in hand. Lions cry here, there is no place for vain promises and sooner or later anti-lick boots inherited from their mother will definitely come in handy. They seek meaning, save and believe. And they say, staring intently at the camera. They say a lot and, invariably, as for the first and last time. They pronounce words that are no longer words at all, but “paroles, paroles, paroles”, password words, magic spells, words-revelations.
The word - events tablet, scepter silver created glory,
In the case of a blind satellite, a strict witness vanishes,
Ally of the Sun, Holy Wheel of the Seraphim,
Sphere contemplating the Sphinx - the walls of fate will guard!
(Valery Bryusov)
Green’s corporate style combined Cocteau’s aestheticism, Greenway’s visual perfection, a deliberate departure from Bresson’s psychologism, the fixation of the Dardennes’ soul algorithms (the latter, by the way, co-produced the Living World) and came out on some new art-turn in the cinematic universe. In the achievements of the American Francoman there is a considerable part of the merit of the operator Rafael O’Burne, because he makes his worlds truly “living”. The camera, placed in front of or between the actors, prepares the frame for their appearance: first, the legs flicker in the fanciful "Clarks" or hands, then the whole figure appears and, finally, a large frontal plane reigns in space. (Oh, those green-spirited faces you want to look at longer than fire, water, or the labor of others!) Just as gradually, as if in order to leave behind a plume of scent for memory, they disappear. Mythological convention of what is happening gives mise-en-scene silence action. Loudly chanting, roaring, waving a mace, scratching a fur belly and never appearing on the screen in full growth, the cannibal is not perceived as less real from this, and who dares to question its existence?
Greene has a lot to hear and feel, not see. Listen. Get in. Don't forget. The word has its holes. My gut. If you do that, the word will do you good. In case of discrepancy between what is visible and what is said, rely on the word. Not every word, for more and more often in the bustle through the holes of light-weight chatter, the truly valuable falls out with an unnoticed gold coin. They are born when God puts a whistle to his lips: to blow air, to move, to kiss. No wonder the key phrase of the picture is a distant roll call with lines from the Holy Scriptures: “Bread is life, like words.” Let us divide bread like words. If you say the right words, you won't die. You will be revived even if your body has once died, for in the world of the living, the breath of the spirit is the breath of the flesh. And the woman shares bread and words with the children, and her confessions, like the magical sounds of the Orpheus lyre, bring a man back from where ghosts dwell. In turn, Greene's film, alive and alive, beginning with graceful acapel singing, sings the posture of His Majesty's Word every minute until the final scene. "What sounded, it sounded." But who knows, perhaps through a miracle you will learn to find words that are worth being spoken and heard.
Where's my word, black bird Kafka? -
If you fly in the snow, that’s all.
Like an abandoned house, like an empty sleeve.
The city at the bottom - where is my word, the dream?
(Konstantin Rupasov)