|
Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
|
|
|
|
|
A storyteller comes to some rural village, and within a minute, he can
tell who the good guys and who the bad guys are. He gathers all the
children around him and starts to tell a story, but some mean villagers
call their kids away and suggest the storyteller to leave. But then
there's Omar, who must be a very good guy because he reads books, and he
agrees to help the storyteller, promising him to lead all the children to
a barn just outside town tonight, so the storyteller can continue his
story. The storyteller tells a story with many parallels to what's going
on in the village. In the story, a disabled young guy writes a book of the
utmost importance, and thus, all of people in the village who can write
copy his book. But the other villagers don't like that, not one bit, so
they slay those who have copied his book, and the disabled guy as well.
Enter the Messenger, who claims to be possessed by the disabled guy, and
he drives the ringleader of the lynching villagers to suicide. And now the
father of the disabled guy wanders the countryside in search for the Messenger, whom he believes to be his son resurrected. The power of this
little story makes the kids rebel against their mean parents, and the good
guys against the bad guys, and it totally changes the village when one of
the kids is beaten half to death by his bad guy father but saved by the
storyteller, who by the way is of course the father of the disabled guy of
his own story. A folkloristic piece of kitsch that's especially
annoying not because it's cheesy or folkloristic (too much folklore can be
annoying in the context of a narrative movie) but because it's so
unbelievably pretentious. The problem is, it doesn't have the slightest
reason to be, its story is full of unreflected clichés presented as some
big truths which ultimately though amount to nothing more than "be
nice, don't be evil!" That above all else, the film doesn't tell much
of a story - which remains totally predictable even if told out of
sequence - and does so in a rather boring way doesn't help either. Pretty
much a waste of time, actually.
|