Skritek and Look Both Ways

Saw two films in the Vancouver International Film Festival today. "Skritek" is directed by Tomas Vorel of the Czech Republic. The difficulties and disappointments of working-class life are told in the form of an energetic non-verbal fable. A little girl saw and struck up a friendship with a Skritek, a kind of hobgoblin, while her family was falling apart—her teenage brother turned punk, her father turned to a younger curvaceous co-worker, her mother turned to pills and she could not concentrate in class. In a North American film, it would have been full of pain and tear and soul searching. Over this side of the pond, people want psychology and empathy. We want to relation to the character and see that the shittiness of life is an aberration rather then the norm. What is refreshing about Skritek is that it does not try to connect with us emotionally, at least not in a realist way. Formally, it does so by turning all dialogues into gibberish, in effect turning it into a silent movie. We only have the visual and the playful music to go on emotionally. As the result, when the family unit veered towards collapse, we feel more hilarity than disturbance. Life as presented is not pretty but seeing the humour in it can help everybody live through it. In the end, the terrible brother is kicked out, the parents get back together and the little girl rides off with the Skritek. It is a fairy tale and it makes no pretension to be otherwise. Life itself is shitty, so why not have some fun with it? Jokes are the only weapon to combat the inescapable life.

While the jokes and happy ending of Skritek is optimism born from a deep seeded pessimism, “Look Both Ways,” a film from Australia, is no different. What made “Look Both Ways” different is that it does not acknowledge the shitty nature of life and choose to believe that shittiness is but an aberration. A guy got run over by a train while walking his dog and the lives of five people—the engineer who was driving the train, the morbid young woman, just coming home from her father’s funeral, who witnessed the accident, the divorced reporter assigned to the case whose girlfriend is unexpectedly pregnant, the handsome news photographer who just found out about his cancer, the news editor who did not know how to deal with the news of his friend’s cancer, and the grieving wife of the deceased--intersected. The film follows the individual lives of these characters immediately after the accident as they each tried to deal with their own pain. By and large it is beautifully done without falling into the trap of emotional indulgence. It does however offer little insight. Each of them take the conventional road to recovery—the engineer was able to forgive himself with the help of his son by apologizing to the widow, the morbid woman broke out of her shell and found her man in the photographer, the photography was able to beat his cancer with the help of the no longer morbid woman, the reporter overcame his selfishness to be with his girlfriend, and the editor rediscovered his family. It is just all so convenient. In the end of the film, a series of photos documented the therapy, the recovery and the world travelling of the happy couple. On the surface, it is comforting to see things all worked out. But if we think just a little more, we would realize that chances of that is slim to none. It is no less a fairy tale then Skritek. The optimism it so insisted on rings forced and false. Would it not be more honest to oneself and others to deal with it as Vorel did? It would be more productive too.