There’s an opaque yet stern quality to Kaloyan (Ognyan “Fyre” Pavlov), a heavily tattooed young man returning to his small Bulgarian hometown after many years abroad. He has been tasked with selling the apartment of his deceased father, a simple enough transaction that gradually comes to encompass a surfeit of overwhelming emotions. Kaloyan is quiet and reserved, and in his various encounters with old friends and various townsfolk he typically plays the role of passive listener. He’s immediately regaled with tales of his late father’s masculinity, loyalty, honor, impeccable war time record, and even his humanitarian efforts. Yet Kaloyan remains unmoved, setting about his task with unflinching rigor and seemingly zero sentimentality. It’s revealed early on that Kaloyan did not attend his father’s funeral, and the nature of the son’s rejection of the father becomes the structural linchpin of the film’s narrative. But Windless is also about the ever-shifting tides of history; here, the personal and the political are inextricably tied together — the decaying village is being razed and rebuilt one chunk at a time, homes replaced with golf courses, shopping centers, and a casino. “They’re turning us into Las Vegas,” intones one of Kaloyan’s old pals, chuckling and shaking his head at the inescapable march of neoliberal “progress.”
It’s all very weighty stuff, and writer/director Pavel G. Vesnakov and cinematographer Orlin Ruevski shoot Windless in the very odd 1:1 aspect ratio, creating a frame that is a stark square. The camera almost never moves, instead framing every conversation as a series of isolated portraits where we only see one person at a time. The extremely confining aspect ratio dictates that most of the compositions are shoulder-up medium shots, but Vesnakov also shoots through various architectural obstructions that make even less of the image visible. The occasional glimpse of a landscape or horizon line offers brief respite, but the film quickly returns to its claustrophobic visual schema. It’s something of a miracle, then, that the film never becomes overwhelmed by metaphor or symbolism, despite the presence of both. Instead, it emphasizes the material reality of this town stuck in a liminal state between world-historical forces. It might seem a bit on the nose to highlight huge concrete busts of Stalin, Lenin, and Putin, but Vesnakov lingers not on the symbolic quality of these felled statues, but instead on the labor required to clear them away. The past is all just debris.
There is no grand catharsis to be found in Windless — Kaloyan does not have an epiphany or a tearful reunification with estranged family members. But there is a gradual softening of his demeanor, tentative steps toward recognizing that the hero beloved by the townspeople and the distant, angry man he knew were the same person, and that everyone contains multitudes. At one point, Kaloyan goes through some of his father’s belongings while on a Zoom call with his mother. He asks her about various items and if he should save them; she tells him to throw everything into a dumpster, lingering for a moment over old black-and-white photos from WWII, before nonchalantly telling him to toss those, too. But later, Vesnakov disrupts his own carefully considered mise en scène and introduces brief home video camcorder footage of young Kaloyan with his a father and extended family having a dinner party. It’s a thrilling rupture, the low-res video footage in stark contrast to the precisely calibrated framings that have come before. Here, then, is finally a messy, necessary sentimentality: the assertion that some things from the past, despite it all, are worth hanging on to.
Published as part of First Look 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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