Püha Tõnu Kiusamine | Estonia/Finland/Sweden | 2009 | Directed by Veiko Õunpuu
Logline: A mid-level manager finds himself inexorably drawn across a lonely landscape, through a series of nightmarish incidents that test his morality and twist his perspective on love, life and death.
Probably the strangest, most enigmatic movie I’ve seen in many moons. At once a labyrinthine, yet desolate odyssey, and the most beautiful and grotesque cinematic oneirdynia since Eraserhead. Shot in magnificent monochrome, the narrative begins in classic, quirky Eastern-European style with a funeral on a bleak shoreline to the sound of traditional Estonian gypsy music. Suddenly a car swerves alongside the procession, bouncing wildly across the rocks and crashes upside down into the surf. The coffin-carriers barely blink an eyelid.
Tony (Taavi Eelmaa), dressed immaculately in black shirt and light overcoat with a head of dark wiry curls and a permanent expression of slighted bewilderment, arrives back home from the funeral of his father, in his flash, loaned Bentley. A black comedy of manners spills out over the dinner wake organized by his sullen wife (Tiina Tauraite), who is apparently having an affair with an actor acquaintance (Hendrik Toompere Jr.). Tony seeks solace in befriending a raven-haired young beauty, Nadezhda (Ravshana Kurkova), whose father Tony has been forced to fire.
Eventually both Tony and Nasezhda become trapped in the perverse and bizarre machinations of The Golden Age, a cabaret-style nightclub housed in the ruins of a concrete warehouse, MCed by the jester-like Count Dionysos Korzybski (Denis Lavant) and hosted by the beastly, furred Herr Meister (Sten Ljunggren).
Yes, The Temptation of St. Tony is a powerful and outlandish descent into the existential nightmare of a post-modern Dante’s Inferno. A tour-de-force of sound and image, with a masterful emotive minimal score from Ulo Krigul, the film equivalent of tasting black pudding sinking into a bowl of blood-red borscht; exotic and carnal, pungent and, most definitely acquired.
Imagine if you will, Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch swilling vodka and munching on a confit human leg, discussing moral irony and apocalyptic symbolism, while the flickering surrealist moments of a Luis Bunuel film is projected like an icy moving image installation in the background. There is much to be beguiled about, and much to create quiet confusion, as director Õunpuu deliberately provides no easy answers, only eerie tableaux and steely contemplation.
The vulnerable soul of man is bared, but remains sheathed in a dreamlike fabric that is stretched and torn, devoured and almost regurgitated. Yet, like a sharp twig digging into the base of your spine at a picnic, there’s a sense of icky humour that rears its lamp black head like an inquisitive eel from a murky pond.
The Temptation of St. Tony is a truly original piece of cinema; indulgent and provocative like the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, but muses and toys with bittersweet fragments like Ingmar Bergman. Director Õunpuu is a riddle unto himself, providing the viewer with severed hands in a swampy creek and the good man forced to bury his murdered dog in a shallow snow grave. The consumption of his fragile lover’s flesh is the salted icing on the open wound of his psyche. Let the darkest of humanity lie with sleeping dogs.