About the movie: "The Temptation of St. Tony" is the second full length feature film from award winning Estonian auteur Veiko Õunpuu.This time it's a co-production between Homeless Bob Production (Estonia), Bronson Club (Finland) and ATMO (Sweden). Õunpuu recieved European New Talent Prize for this project and it was awarded by European Union's MEDIA programme. It will premiere in September or October.
Synopsis:
Tony develops an aversion to gushing claims of his goodness and the issue starts to haunt him. Is he good? Why should one be good? Whom would it benefit? While Tony thinks and thinks, he is forced to fire the one thousand employees under his command, to be a witness to his wife’s betrayal, to bury his grandfather, and finally to find 12 pairs of human hands in the underbrush. As Tony hopes to find a new and simpler life in a strip club with the help of a Russian secretary named Nadezhda who is earning extra money by working there, fate steps into his life in the form of the mysterious Herr Meister. He gives Tony a choice – either a rebellion doomed to failure and perish, or absolute submission and a life full of power and enjoyment. Though Tony is accustomed to a worry-free life, he chooses rebellion – much to his own surprise – and looses. Man is truly a bottomless abyss.
Estonian film critics and film journalists voted "The Temptation of St. Tony" the best Estonian film in 2009 and 10th best movie in Estonian film theatres in 2009.
Their TOP10, if you are interested:
1. Entre les murs
2. Antichrist
3. Gomorra
4. Gran Torino
5. Inglourious Basterds
6. The Wrestler
7. Gake no ue no Ponyo
8. District 9
9. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
10. The Temptation of St. Tony
Danish distributor LevelK picked up "The Temptation of St. Tony" and Õunpuu's previous film "Autumn Ball". "The Temptation..." will be featured at Berlin film market in February. Also, the film is in Rotterdam and Götheborg film festival's line-ups.
eerik wrote:Danish distributor LevelK picked up "The Temptation of St. Tony" and Õunpuu's previous film "Autumn Ball". "The Temptation..." will be featured at Berlin film market in February. Also, the film is in Rotterdam and Götheborg film festival's line-ups.
I haven't seen it, but the other week it picked up some really good buzz at the IFF Rotterdam. Sort of the festival surprise. It will probably get some distribution around these parts as well.
I'm curious what others here make of this film. It's beautifully shot to be sure, with some powerful sequences that instantly brought to my mind Roy Andersson, Wenders, Lynch, Buñuel, Tarr, Greenaway, and a Les Savy Fav concert, but I'm not quite sure what it all adds up to in the end, or if it finally contributes much on its own other than a series of very well done homages. I think I say this because, when I mention specific names above, it's not that I was reminded stylistically of these directors, but of specific scenes from these directors' films. In any case, I thought it was a highly entertaining film, and I'd certainly recommend that everyone with a taste for the bizarre (and a bit of a stomach for cannibalism!) check it out. It's out now on DVD from Olive Films.
I saw this when it came through town early in the year, and it was fantastically bizarre in all the right ways. It is obviously riffing off of a wide range of sources, and everyone seems to come up with distinct lists of 3 definite influences, and no two lists are the same, and many end up being entirely distinct from the others. It's that sort of thing. swo17 gives 7, which I guess is fitting, although perhaps he should have gone all the way to 17. There is a sequence involving the police which is highly reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial, and there were some stylistic touches that reminded me of Grandrieux. I read an interview with the director and he was very, very cinema literate, so it would surprise me if he had not seen works from all of the people mentioned, and perhaps he was even riffing directly on their works. I don't think it really matters much. Recently I watched They All Loved Each Other So Much, The Dreamers, and Easy A, all films directly referencing the films they are riffing off of. If The Temptation of St. Tony is merely the sum of its stylistic referents, as those films are to some degree, then it is by far the best of those and does it without making an obvious point of it. I happen to find it to be more like a phoenix birthed in the flames of those influences, and I think it outdoes many of the potential points of reference handily.
The film goes through a variety of visual, atmospheric, and comedic modes, though, pretty consistently achieving them all with compelling skill. I'm a big fan of the sort of phantasmagoria the film achieves, I'm an even bigger fan of the kind of grotesque humor it achieves, and perhaps most of all a fan of the ambivalent tragicomic approach the film takes. As such, the film was almost tailor-made for my tastes, and it instantly became one of my favorite films, but there are certainly elements which play much stronger than others for me. I don't mean that as a criticism, because I think the confluence of such a diverse array of elements is both incredibly difficult to pull off and extremely rewarding, and in fact reminds me a great deal more of a postmodern literary approach than a cinematic one, except for a certain set of films that come to mind that recall pastiche more than a truly cohesive confluence. However, it's one of those things where the individual pieces are (understandably so) at times less than the best of a similar style, and a kid can greedily dream of more. Still, though, if we consider the merging of these styles into a cohesive whole the film's central feature then I think the film represents the best of its type that I have experienced, and some of its individual sequences are so amazing that I would put them up against anything else in cinema. Of course, as I said, this film is completely everything I love in cinema, so it doesn't surprise me that others react somewhat less enthusiastically. But, really, I can't imagine anyone just being indifferent. An intense ambivalence or hatred, perhaps, but indifference? It seems difficult to fathom.
