Lithuanian myths, folk songs, and hallucinations guide Deimantas Narkevičius’s film Twittering Soul. Set in the late 19th century before the Lumière Brothers began making films in France, the film roots itself in the countryside of Southern Lithuania. Vast shots of bucolic greenery sweep across the screen, accompanied by tinges of German romanticism that allow Twittering Soul to feel like a relic of the past. And yet, Narkevičius distinctly grounds us in the present through his use of stereoscopic 3D. This move from 2D to 3D can be visually strange in execution, with objects and people sometimes jutting out at bizarre angles, but the decision also works by lending the film a haunting, distancing effect, distinguishing Twittering Soul from its traditional period piece counterparts for the better.
Narkevičius’s film begins on June 24, St. John’s Day, which is also known as Lithuanian Midsommer. Light fills the screen on this lazy summer holiday, sinking us into a small community of peasants, mostly women. Narkevičius lingers over several people, but most interesting are two unnamed women (Laima Akstinaitė and Greta Petrovskytė), best friends or possible lovers, who skip through the woods until one of them is bitten by a snake. Despite the injury, these women continue moving, shapeshifting into nymphs and swimming naked in the river bends while the other women spin flax seed into fabric. Eventually, one of them greets death in a white dress, where she is shown levitating toward viewers in 3D. Twittering Soul‘s isn’t easily legible and often feels not to make much sense at all, but most peasant characters in the film feel as amorphous as folk songs, constantly shifting as the narrative progresses. Their lives and stories are not pinned down like the oral tradition of their culture, reflecting fleeting nature of individual lives within march of history, especially in the face of the 20th century’s coming onslaught.
The wealthy landowners in Twittering Soul offer a juxtaposition to the peasants’ otherworldly nature. Often framed within the strict confines of their manor home, these cosmopolitans speak Polish rather than Lithuanian, and are often shown enjoying the possibilities of technology. Dvarininkas (Aleksas Kazanavičius), owner of the estate, is obsessed with photography. He cuts up photos and collages them together in a 3D effect that mirrors the film’s visual landscape, only breaking when he needs to survey his land. But he exists differently within nature than the peasants; he sees the land simply for its means to profit, while his daughter Dvarininko (Auguste Simulynaite), on the other hand, is more in tune with the natural world. Neither father nor daughter are openly antagonistic, but Dvarininko’s way of thinking means she’s at least accepted by the peasants, following her senses through nature unlike her father.
Narkevičius is known for submitting personal histories and political events to narrative structures and cinematic techniques, and yet Twittering Soul, for all intents and purposes, lacks both plot and defined characters. With this film, Narkevičius instead makes space for a lost time in recent Lithuanian history, constructing a work of built primarily of mood and atmosphere. To this end, the camera immediately lends an aura of foreboding, often capturing nature from a God’s-eye view and surveying the world from unnatural perspectives, which presents images that are and establishes a world that is objectively beautiful but also distinctly strange and askew. The naked eye cannot see the world in the same way as the camera and Narkevičius understands this, a notion the director further complicates with his use of stereoscopic 3D. With this technology, the camera moves through space like a ghost, capturing the past, yes, but also keeping the future present in the viewer’s mind through the apparatus of the 3D lens. More than mere gimmick, this essential dichotomy is one of the film’s strongest features, lending Twittering Soul a fabulist texture in its ability to evoke past and present in the very same image and instant.
DIRECTOR: Deimantas Narkevičius; CAST: Augustė Šimulynaitė, Laima Akstinaitė, Greta Petrovskytė, Valentinas Krulikovski; DISTRIBUTOR: Dekanalog; IN THEATERS: October 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 10 min.
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