Andonov’s methods lived a short life, and his career as a director has only four films. At the same time, he is one of the best and most significant Bulgarian directors and thinks subtly and very original. So severe medieval “revenge” “Goat’s Horn” purely externally almost homage to Kurosave, but it has completely independent aesthetic features. The plot of “Big Boredom”, which unfolds in modern times, continues the history of film adaptations of political spy detectives Bogomil Rainov (genre is very scarce under socialism), but differs sharply from the earlier film.
“There is nothing like bad weather” is Raynov’s most famous text. The film on it came out aesthetically, but replayed in the depiction of the sweet abominations of bourgeois mass culture, which, it seems, are sometimes admired in the film, showing alcoholic and bohemian orchards, long drives on fashionable cars through an authentic landscape (Andonov seeks to shoot the enemy in his own lair, this is not a typical London in the scenery of Riga or Tallinn, as filmed in our country), etc. So it looks like a long story of The Temptation of the Holy Scout in the desert of capitalist reality.
"Big Boredom" is no more interesting example. It would seem that literally pushing the foreheads of the representatives of the two systems, the director could walk along the beaten path of explication of obvious meanings: the fighters of the invisible fronts as if personify the level of the conscious, who like not them to peel, sprinkle, reclaim those phrases that most represent the imaginary and true values of the West and East. However, the almost stage conditions - two scouts, seriously wounding each other, conducting intimate conversations within a meter of each other - led to a strange effect. Andonov is least interested in the implementation of capital rational schemes. This is a fight between two unconscious people. It turns out that the scout raises the question of the meaning of life and the meaning of his activities. It turns out that the almost Nietzschean character “from that side” thinks nihilistically, but without any heroic posture. The great boredom of nothingness is all that is given to man, whoever he may be. "Our" man "out there" is a knight without fear, but his position is played out indirectly, not directly. And, apparently, not coincidentally.
The fabulous center - two scouts peering at each other like a mirror - makes no sense without numerous flashbacks pointing to the past, present and even future of the heroes. This effect is much weaker than such a reception in the “Angels of the Night” of German, but still skillfully reproaching the seemingly simple antithesis. Two looking at each other become almost doubles, something happens on an unconscious level. Sometimes it is difficult to understand what the flashback refers to, the reality or fantasy generated by the consciousness of the seriously wounded. The same hero, but in a ridiculous hipp wig and acid jersey, rushing like a hare in a foreign topos, does not look like a knight of makeup and disguise, but a person who has lost all ties and lost all meanings.
That's certainly not true. The film still remains within the framework of social aesthetics, but as if filmed not about scouts, but about people who have to live and die. They are not superhumans, but mortals like everyone else. I'll let myself be banal. One gets the impression that Andonov seems to anticipate his own fate, his film statement looks too personal, forgetting about genre laws, therefore leading to an effect much greater than such films are supposed by default.