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BIRDS, ORPHANS AND FOOLS
1969
Director
Juraj Jakubisko
Starring
Magda Vášáryová
Jiří Sýkora
Philippe Avron
Runtime
78 minutes
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Shot immediately after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and studded with cultural and historical references, BIRDS, ORPHANS AND FOOLS evokes the cinema of Godard, Buñuel and the anarchic air of Vera Chytilová. Jakubisko’s exhilarating and free-wheeling film is by turns playful, surreal and, finally, increasingly nightmarish. Without explicitly referencing the ‘68 invasion, it presents a dilapidated, unmistakably post-invasion world-gone-mad to which the only viable response is to embrace foolishness.
The film concerns a threesome who bunker down together to collectively keep the world’s ills at bay, but not their rivaling affections for one another. The sexually fluid Yorick (Jiří Sýkora), who was raised in an institution for children with intellectual disabilities; his best friend and roommate Andrzej (Philippe Avron), a virginal Polish photographer, and Marta (MARKETA LAZAROVÁ’s eponymous Magda Vášáryová) , a buzz cut-sporting young woman initially mistaken by Yorick for a man when he wakes up after a gay party - presented with remarkable matter-of-factness - to find her in their apartment.
Their newly adopted group home is sprawling, ramshackle and strangely porous, freely admitting entry and egress through a variety of unorthodox portals, including to an aged landlord, young children and countless small birds. Its strewn furnishings afford many opportunities for ludic and giddily intertextual japes and dress-up set-pieces. The film is a dizzying ride. Cinematographer Igor Luther and composer Zdeněk Liška make for the perfect accomplices to realize Jakubisko’s freewheeling, kaleidoscopic vision, offering expressionistic audiovisual rhymes for Yorick, Andrzej and Marta’s desultory, carnivalesque follies, maintaining a captivating revel even when the mood of this most baroque of films turns grimly mordant.
“A mad universe of surrealist tableaux and bizarre actions. This unconventional fantasy blends dream and reality, tenderness and cruelty. A delirious tour de force.” - Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art
“It becomes obvious in seconds why director Juraj Jakubisko is known as ‘the Slovak Fellini’ and has also attracted comparisons with Peter Greenaway, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Sergei Parajanov. Filled with dazzling, hallucinatory images but suppressed until the Velvet Revolution unlocked the vaults, this is another extraordinary rediscovery of Slovak cinema.” - Michael Brooke
“Jakubisko is kin to Brazil’s Glauber Rocha, America’s Robert Downey, Mexico’s Alejandro Jodorovski, Yuri Ilyenko of the Ukraine, Sergei Paradzhanov of Armenia, Miklós Jancsó of Hungary, and in a way to Poland’s Stanislaw Kutz. They share a world in which the basic color is blood red, the dominant sign is that of death, the main diversion is violence, in which heroes dance a merry jig of revolution and war, only to add their heads to the others that have fallen.” - Antonín J. Liehm1
FOR FANS OF: DAISIES; a post-apocalyptic version of BAND OF OUTSIDERS; if JULES AND JIM were directed by Emir Kusturica at his most chaotic; Lars Von Trier’s THE IDIOTS and choosing to confront social oppression by acting like a dumbass; three-way love in a gutted American convertible.
The film concerns a threesome who bunker down together to collectively keep the world’s ills at bay, but not their rivaling affections for one another. The sexually fluid Yorick (Jiří Sýkora), who was raised in an institution for children with intellectual disabilities; his best friend and roommate Andrzej (Philippe Avron), a virginal Polish photographer, and Marta (MARKETA LAZAROVÁ’s eponymous Magda Vášáryová) , a buzz cut-sporting young woman initially mistaken by Yorick for a man when he wakes up after a gay party - presented with remarkable matter-of-factness - to find her in their apartment.
Their newly adopted group home is sprawling, ramshackle and strangely porous, freely admitting entry and egress through a variety of unorthodox portals, including to an aged landlord, young children and countless small birds. Its strewn furnishings afford many opportunities for ludic and giddily intertextual japes and dress-up set-pieces. The film is a dizzying ride. Cinematographer Igor Luther and composer Zdeněk Liška make for the perfect accomplices to realize Jakubisko’s freewheeling, kaleidoscopic vision, offering expressionistic audiovisual rhymes for Yorick, Andrzej and Marta’s desultory, carnivalesque follies, maintaining a captivating revel even when the mood of this most baroque of films turns grimly mordant.
“A mad universe of surrealist tableaux and bizarre actions. This unconventional fantasy blends dream and reality, tenderness and cruelty. A delirious tour de force.” - Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art
“It becomes obvious in seconds why director Juraj Jakubisko is known as ‘the Slovak Fellini’ and has also attracted comparisons with Peter Greenaway, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Sergei Parajanov. Filled with dazzling, hallucinatory images but suppressed until the Velvet Revolution unlocked the vaults, this is another extraordinary rediscovery of Slovak cinema.” - Michael Brooke
“Jakubisko is kin to Brazil’s Glauber Rocha, America’s Robert Downey, Mexico’s Alejandro Jodorovski, Yuri Ilyenko of the Ukraine, Sergei Paradzhanov of Armenia, Miklós Jancsó of Hungary, and in a way to Poland’s Stanislaw Kutz. They share a world in which the basic color is blood red, the dominant sign is that of death, the main diversion is violence, in which heroes dance a merry jig of revolution and war, only to add their heads to the others that have fallen.” - Antonín J. Liehm1
FOR FANS OF: DAISIES; a post-apocalyptic version of BAND OF OUTSIDERS; if JULES AND JIM were directed by Emir Kusturica at his most chaotic; Lars Von Trier’s THE IDIOTS and choosing to confront social oppression by acting like a dumbass; three-way love in a gutted American convertible.