Monday, January 17, 2011

Szamanka

Diector: Andrzej Zulawski Running time: 1 hr 57 min Year of release: 1996

A self absorbed anthropologist begins a passionate, ill advised affair with a unstable, nymphomaniac college student while becoming unhealthy obsessed with the remains of a ancient, recently excavated shaman, eventually leading to madness and bloodshed. I tried so hard to like this film, something made incredibly hard by the fact that most of the screen time is devoted to two loathsome individuals having sex or when there not having sex(which is once in a blue moon) acting boorishly: the man is a regular asshole and the woman is gratingly obnoxious and batty. When the time came for the (literally) blood drenched finale I had long since stopped caring about the fates of anyone in this film (the exception being the man's fiancee, who gets treated like dirt).Watching Szamanka was a real endurance test, not because of the highly toted graphic content but due to the fact that it was a painstakingly dull, pretentious film with awful characters. I'm sure theres a message to be found in this film, weather the characters are metaphors for political institutions, commentary on human sexuality ect. frankly it's not worth suffering through this film in order to try and decipher it.; there are much better films out there with similar messages and themes.

Grade: 1.5/5

Availability: Notoriously hard to get a hold of in the states until now. Mondo Vision has just released it in beautiful packaging that rivals Criterion.