ŽIURI

Andrey Pauonov. Post-communist grotesque, hope and other flying objects

Auksė Kancerevičiūtė

If not for various flying objects – no, nothing supernatural, just butterflies and mosquitoes – the films by Bulgarian director Andrey Paounov would, indeed, be different. How different – that is already a probability theory that may be of interest to the film heroes themselves: so extraordinary and yet easily recognisable, they are determined to change the world or to conform, to survive, forget the past and finally, to reach the promised future... even if it only exists in the form of air castles in the minds of tireless enthusiasts.

These were, indeed, the principles that communism was based upon – nobody has seen it and yet its consequences are still being felt today. They are tragic rather than cheerful although A. Paounov manages to narrate dramatic stories in a light and easy manner. When connected to the information source, one can listen to bad news every day. To have a moan is also applicable, especially in the countries where people were taught to obey and wait rather than think. When there had left nothing to wait for a wide horizon that opened up then simply turned into an abyss. Some took advantage of “new opportunities”, others left walking a tightrope. It is those on the edge of an abyss, those rejected by the system, socially vulnerable and full of the weirdest ideas, who actually interest A. Paounov. And yet, isn’t it possible that Georgi Lulchev, a hero of the film Georgi and the Butterflies, is a contemporary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky or Albert Einstein? Or rather a romantic Don Quixote tilting not at windmills but a sluggish and stiff bureaucratic apparatus? He is certain that unusual ideas bring luck sooner or later. In the meantime, the director captures unsuccessful attempts to change present situation, to pull through humiliating misery that a psychiatrist, a neurologist, a specialist of traditional Chinese medicine, an administrator, in short – a dreamer, and his foster home for the disabled has got into. According to the manager, “patients have a right to live in human conditions” and yet they cannot move into newly built premises that due to bureaucratic obstacles are now being left empty. Sheltered in a 16th century monastery, the disabled are like God’s crucifixes hardly necessary at all for a society that functions according to the principles of enterprise and economic benefit. Georgi, the film's protagonist and a narrator, aims at reorganising the property in a way that will free it from others mercy. There are many means like, for example, arranging pheasant hunting for tourists from the West, picking snails, and breeding coypu. Or better silkworms and ostriches? Or even better making soya bread for diabetics? While his mind high up in the clouds he conceives one plan after another, patients consider if the money could be used to buy some food: waffles, juice or sausage, the taste of which is long forgotten...

Paounov, however, refuses to exploit a handy theme of martyrdom and the disadvantaged and to show us heart-breaking scenes. Instead of making us cry and moralising, he invites us to laugh and decide for ourselves if what is going on in front of us is an absurd comedy or rather a tragedy presented in a Balkan style. Where is the line between fantasy and reality, genius and madness? And why those bloody flying objects – zanzare, as would maintain Italian pastor stressing the pinging “zzz” sound – mess with the heads of seemingly sinless ordinary citizens of extraordinary talents and would not allow them to lead a quiet life?

The film The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories features even more participants of this ecological, social and political carnival: a sweet elderly couple, armed with a vacuum cleaner and moral aplomb; piano tuner and composer Todor performing a wide repertoire of musical pieces; a dance teacher saving local youth from inactivity; shooting and feasting hunters; fishermen Ivan and Petar counting ships passing by; Cuban Fernando Diaz who has lived there since the days of the Soviet cooperation programme; a former town mayor who gave all his strength for the welfare of the people – an entire constellation of characters introducing themselves straight into the camera and demonstrating their trophies and lifetime achievements. It looks as if they were hosting chance-guests or participating in a comic reality show. There is a single problem causing everybody’s concern – mosquitoes, the absence of which would make Belen, a quiet recess of Bulgaria, into a “gem of the Danube”. And still better if an atomic power plant being built for decades would finally start working... Things would improve... You watch and cannot cease thinking what kind of pesticides were then (not so long ago though) used to spray people’s minds? A. Paounov’s unconventional position may at times be disturbing as though he was playing a double game where every tiny hint, insignificant as it may seem, hides several underlying meanings; whereas an elated and emphatically optimistic tone is somewhat reminiscent of the rhetoric of propaganda. An attitude that is being shaped in one direction makes one question the representative surfaces and look beyond over-anecdotic reality. You realise that something is being exquisitely concealed as it was then, in the infamous past when “a bright future was being built”. Rusty massive cranes, red poppies blooming along an abandoned gigantic building, fragments of a careless life flickering through the archive film footage, or a horse dancing with pain in a death island among ruins – being rather “deafened” by the avalanche of words and information, one may notice feelings, associations and not-so-playful facts starting to emerge. In 1949-1959 nearby the cosy town a communist concentration camp existed. According to a citizen of Belen constantly weaving business plans in his head, it would “provide the local tourism industry with an exotic zest”. Made in 1992, however, an official interview with Julia Ruzhgeva, a former camp guard now facing criminal proceedings for murders, adds no exotic zest whatsoever. Remembering her angular face and piercing satanic gaze makes your skin crawl. Where does this cruelty come from? Does it really lie deep inside human consciousness waiting for the right moment to speak itself? Does it prostrate a soul and then quietly curls inside again? For it turns out that a mother, now a beautiful woman radiating the joy of life, back then was an executioner as well. Whereas an old man slowly pottering around the kitchen worked for the KGB.

Observing the theatre of grotesque ideologies, regimes and fates, we are invited by A. Paounov to draw our own conclusions. Fortunately, he leaves a small bit of hope fluttering among the shattering illusions and grimaces of reality like a Shostakovich waltz or a little white pesticidal cloud to exterminate mosquitoes.