It’s a human being and it sounds bitter. Miscarriage is a purely surreal movie. I began with the fact that since childhood I have been haunted by the mystery of man. Why was he created to create and destroy the world? Who wants that? The maker? And what after death? All my life I have been searching for the truth. I read philosophical treatises, religious canons, numerous works of psychologists. But as I did not know the answer, I do not know (director Yuri Manusov).
Contrary to popular belief, the fate of works of art, their widespread fame or oblivion, largely depends not only, and sometimes even not so much, on their artistic merits, but on many different factors: socio-political conjuncture, current art history fashion, the subjective opinion of critics, the will of chance. During the years of perestroika, films of a socio-critical orientation were in demand, so Miscarriage was thrown to the sidelines of the cinematic process, remained in oblivion, although he received a prize for directing at the international film festival in San Remo.
The main character talks about the meaning of life, asking the Hamletian question “to be or not to be”, to live or not to live. The film is shot in a psychedelic, surreal manner, where the usual laws of time and space do not apply, as if inviting the viewer to swim along the waves of the “collective unconscious”, according to the cartography of the human psyche compiled by Stanislav Grof. Extremely unusual not only by the standards of Soviet, but also world cinema, it is similar to the exuberant film fantasy of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Exquisitely aesthetic visual range, sometimes reminiscent of the revived paintings of Renaissance artists, it has direct (sometimes slightly modified) images of masterpieces of world painting in the range from Raphael and Giotto to Malevich. The film contains a lot of references to the ideas of quantum physics, mythology, philosophical doctrines (from Schopenhauer’s ideas to existentialism and the “society of the spectacle”), famous works of classics of world literature (from Dante and Lewis Carroll to Dostoevsky, Bulgakov and Exupery). According to the director, our world is a theater of the absurd, in which there is no meaning, a person is an unsuccessful experiment, a miscarriage of the universe, and the Creator (if there is one) is a ruthless demiurge, cynically playing with the fate of people.
In general, this philosophical-psychedelic, picturesque film can be recommended to everyone who loves a truly unusual movie. If the names of Alejandro Jodorowski, Peter Greenaway, Raul Ruiz, Guy Maddin are not an empty sound for you, then this film is a must-see.