Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Pavel G. Vesnakov
Starring: Fyre, Veselin Petrov
An indie cinema cliché is the premise of a protagonist returning to the
small town they left behind for a new life in the city and discovering
it's where they really belong after all. It's usually played for
warm-hearted laughs or romance, but not in Bulgarian director Pavel G. Vesnakov's second feature Windless.
In Vesnakov's version of the oft-told tale, his young protagonist
Kaloyan (played by Bulgarian rapper Fyre) returns to his
rural village having left several years earlier with his mother to build
a new life in Spain. There's no reconciliation with estranged relatives
or rekindled romances with childhood sweethearts for Kaloyan however. He
has returned "home" with the single-minded task of off-loading his late
father's apartment to the property developers currently in the process
of levelling much of the village to build a golf and spa complex.
Initially Kaloyan has no sentimental attachment to his birthplace. When
he's informed that the bodies of his father and his grandparents will
need to be exhumed as the local cemetery is set to be built over,
Kaloyan reacts with a cold-hearted "whatever," happily allowing the
local municipality to take care of relocating his late family members.
It's clear Kaloyan didn't have the best relationship with his father,
and when his mother commands him to unsentimentally bin the contents of
the apartment via a zoom call, we surmise she may not have been treated
very well by her husband either.
But as Kaloyan encounters the villagers who knew his father and hears
their tales of how adored he was, he begins to silently question his
opinion of the old man. It emerges that Kaloyan resents his father's
lack of emotion and compassion towards him, but he comes to understand
that it was a means of toughening him up, preparing him for a hard life.
One of his father's friends recounts a piece of advice he once imparted:
"Kiss your children only when they're sleeping." Joining an old friend
in the grisly task of clearing out other homes for demolition, Kaloyan
finds some of them still occupied by elderly residents. One is an old
man who suddenly has decided to defiantly stay put, another an old lady
who Kaloyan discovers has just overdosed on pills in an attempt to
commit suicide as she "doesn't want to be a burden to anyone."
Fyre plays the role of Kaloyan with an almost complete lack of
dialogue, often required to silently listen to the ramblings of others.
At times, the image of Julius Cesar tattooed across the back of his head
is more outwardly expressive than Kaloyan's face, but Fyre uses his body
to illustrate his character's changing state of mind, initially tense
and stiff, gradually loosening up as he becomes more comfortable in this
world he left behind. At one point he even breaks down laughing at a
dinner thrown by one of his father's adoring friends. When we see
Kaloyan first, all we notice is his heavily inked flesh, more tattoo
than man, but over the course of the film a face emerges from under his
defensive tough guy face paint.
Vesnakov opts to shoot in an unconventional 1:1 ratio (think Xavier
Dolan's Mommy), which initially seems like an attention seeking gimmick but allows
for intense close-ups that resemble portraits. The narrow frame also
means that Kaloyan is often offscreen when he's listening to the locals
regale him with recollections of his father, emphasising his
self-imposed physical and emotional exile. Though no less than five
writers are credited, the dialogue has an improvisational feel, and if
you walked in blind to one of Windless's many scenes of craggy faces waxing lyrical or bemoaning change,
you'd be forgiven for mistaking Vesnakov's film for a
documentary. Windless may not be a documentary but it is a document of a corner of
Eastern Europe so desperate to put its past behind it that it's willing
to bulldoze its heritage.
Windless plays at the 2024
Belfast Film Festival on November 2nd.
