Saturday 8 May 2010

Metastaze

Translated in some places as Metastasis and others as Metastases (I prefer the latter), this movie has been called "the Croatian Trainspotting" with good reason. Three of the four principal characters could hardly be closer to Renton, Begbie and Spud (although there is no direct counterpart to Sick Boy). Krpa, the Begbie equivalent, is an extraordinarily nasty piece of work, a sociopathic, misogynistic veteran with a hair-trigger temper and a deep sense of nationalism. The most sympathetic character - the Renton equivalent - is just out of rehab and trying to stay straight(ish) while his father encourages him to look for work and his overindulgent mother steals crafty drags on his cigarettes. Mean while, our two friendly losers - the Spud types - are drunkenly, goallessly stumbling through life toward an early grave.

Knowing next-to-nothing about the social and political context of the film, which is clearly making a point about post-war Croatia, I could only engage with it as a story about its characters. And in some ways it's well done. The relationships are believable even while they're in some cases utterly depressing, involving intense scenes of domestic violence and general misery. However, the occasional interest this film had for me was too infrequent to lift it above its limitations.

One of these limitations comes from the fact that Metastaze seems to be very cheaply made - a scene in which our heroes sit around in a graveyard seems to have been filmed by a sole camera which hangs above them, swaying gently in the wind. The lighting is poor, although I don't know whether this is a deliberate, aesthetic choice by a Dogme-influenced director or simply an artefact of a low budget. As I've said before, I often find films to be underlit, and this feature may bother other viewers less than it did me.

The cheapness of the film is not limited to its filming. The quality of the script may be very high, for all I know, but the subtitling was not. "Your" appearing as "You're" was the worst example of the errors strewn through the subtitles, making the watching experience far from that of some films with such excellent titles that you barely notice the conversation is entering through your eyes rather than your ears. The subtitling is constantly there in Metastaze.

This is not the sort of film which would be ruined by knowledge of the ending, so I hope I will be forgiven for describing it. (It's also not a film many people are likely to see, I would think: it was premièred to about 60 people at the East End film festival a couple of weeks ago but I doubt it will get a wide general release.) The film ends with Krpa, having bungled a bank robbery because his lookout pal nodded off on duty, being chased on foot through the streets of Zagreb by a couple of policemen. So far, so Trainspotting. However, this scene is set not to Iggy Pop but to music straight from Benny Hill. It's a strange tone and it illustrates what for me was the main problem with Metastaze - I was unable to decipher the point the film was trying to make. It might be that this was because it wasn't trying to make one, but that seems unlikely given the political overtones and the subject matter. Equally, it's unclear why metastases - cancerous growths which migrate from a primary tumour and settle in other parts of the body - was chosen as a title: presumably it was meant to be evocative or metaphorically appropriate, but it fails in practice.

So was this film just poorly-thought-out, or was something lost in translation? I can't tell - but, either way, I cannot really say that Metastaze deserves 80 minutes of your time.

3 comments:

  1. I've just been to the London Sci-Fi film festival where there were huge problems with subtitling. Some were so poor that you couldn't follow what was going on at all. It can really affect your enjoyment of a film. A lot of them were still in production though - is that the case with Metastaze if it was at a film festival?

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  3. Hmm, maybe. I haven't found much about it online. Improving the subtitles would definitely have made it more enjoyable.


    Incidentally, the entire film is on youtube!

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