SIBERIA

Italy/Germany, 2019, 92 minutes, Colour.
Willem Dafoe, Simon Mc Burney,
Directed by Abel Ferrara.

Abel Ferrara has been directing offbeat films for 40 years. He started in exploitation. He also had his own personal problems, addictions, religious searching.

By the 1990s, he made some interesting dramas, especially Bad Lieutenant, and The Funeral which won the OCIC award at Venice in 1996.

He has had five collaborations with Willem Dafoe, especially his Pasolini, with Dafoe as the celebrated director at the end of his life.

Siberia is, one might say, at the physical and psychological back of beyond. During the opening credits, Dafoe’s character, Clint, gives a long story about his relationship with his father and hunting. As the film opens, he is in Siberia at a wooden framed cabin, bar, encountering locals in their language, a pregnant woman with her chattering grandmother – with the possibility that Clint is the father of the child.

In extraordinary snow and forest country, the screenplay has Clint going out on something of a personal quest by literally falling down the cliff face which leads to a number of encounters which are surreal rather than real, some hallucinations. He encounters another presence of himself, naked. He has images of his former wife and their clashes. He sees people in a cave looking for salvation, naked people in some kind of collective camp, a strange seeming mystic (Simon McBurney) along with sequences in burning sand desert, member of his father, some dancing to the song, Runaway, achievable and colourful dancing around a maypole.

Is he looking for the meaning of life, the essence of existence? Is in plagued by guilt and the need for redemption? Why does he have these kinds of hallucinations? Ferrara doesn’t offer many answers or even clues to answers, just presenting the characters, images, symbols for the audience to contemplate. Which may be far more than most audiences are prepared to contemplate or value.

Screened in Berlinale, 2020. Some of the reviewers were far more eloquent than this particular review, relishing their opportunities for creative language and their comments.

Guy Lodge, Variety: “Siberia, a beautiful and unhinged, sometimes hilarious trek into geographical and psychological wilderness that will delight some and mystify many others.…
… Situating view was firmly inside Clint’s already detached headspace.
Those who require a standard A-to-B narrative would be best advised to check out at an early stage.
… Give way to disconnected sites of memory, fantasy and nightmare: phases of actual forgotten dreams, caramel expanses of distinctly un-Siberian desert, an abandoned Russian death camp, a spring garden adorned by a pastel maypole

Deborah Young, Screen: Abel Ferrara’s stream of consciousness experiment. The screenplay pinball’s between oblique grotesque shock tactics and incoherent indulgence.
Pursuing a cinema of sensation agenda is all very well, there should be a kernel of honesty and meaning in the film, or it just looks like the Instagram feed of a well-travelled psychopath.
“Your reason is an obstacle�, announces the magician, which sounds a lot like Ferrara giving himself licensed to do whatever he feels like doing, while plundering his central character’s subconscious the images that are arresting, frequently unsettling, but mean very little when strung together.