Somewhere in the
Slovakian countryside: Terezka (Dorota Nvotková) is kicked out of school, and now she tries to get home to her mother (Emília
Vásáryová) in Bratislava having nothing more than a rough
map from the area that looks like a children's drawing. And as surreal as
her map looks, as bizarre the countryside turns out to be in places, as
she encounters a trainstation where no train ever stops and the
stationmaster uses the rails only to have stuff flattened by the passing
trains, a truckdriver in a broke down truck whose main purpose it seems to
destroy whatever he's got, a woman buried in the soil to the neck who
hatches eggs while sleeping, a husband (whom Terezka seduces) marrying a wife
double his age in a weird ceremony, a guest of honour of some party hiding
in the kitchen and more eager to play games with Terezka than to join the
actual festivities and so on. Finally, Terezka gets to Bratislava and
gets the final clue leading to mother from some drunkard, but her mother
turns out to be no bigger than a match, and can't provide her with the
answers she's been looking for on her journey. Ultimately, Terezka buries
the map leading to her mother, never to be found again ... Somewhat
weird and fairy-tale-like film that light-footedly enhances the
pittoresque Slovakian countryside with unexpected elements of surrealism
and is never far from irony - yet as fascinating as Orbis Pictus might be
in parts, it's by no means perfect, in its sequence of episodes the film
feels at times awfully episodic without the individual subplots
necessarily contributing to the bigger picture. Yet for its intentionally
unspectacular aethetics, its restrained approach to weirdness and its
subtle narrative, the film is still at least worth a look ...
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