Freeze, Die, Come to Life (1989)

There is this very thin line between artistic and merely miscalculated. There is a similar line between Truffaut and those attempting to recreate his iconic "400 Blows". "Freeze Die Come to Life", a Russian attempt at Truffaut, walks that line and fails miserably. Using stark black and white photography to set his tone, director Vitali Kanevsky attempts to tell his semi-autobiographical tale about a poor kid in Russia and the hardships of daily life. Throughout the entire 105-minutes the hardships are apparent, with our lead child doing everything from destroying trains and putting yeast in the bathroom to being arrested, the hardships are shown. One could even argue that they are pushed in your face minute after minute, completely diluting the actual story that needs to be told (if there is one). Winner of the Camera D'Ore at Cannes in 1990, there is no question of the value of each scene meticulously set up and planned, but the overall story seems to have taken backseat and ultimately doomed this film.

For the first thirty minutes of this film, I was enthralled by the bleak images, the stark realism, and the darkness that surrounded this man's boyhood. Thinking that it would change into this fight for a better life, the darkness continued to be pushed into your seat, with further disaster and destruction following this child everywhere he went. Again, with a stronger story behind it, this would have been an ironic precursor to films like "Requiem for a Dream" or, dare I say it, "The 400 Blows", but it just didn't happen. So much was emphasized on the bleak, that our character became one-dimensional, his best-friend became a paper-thin understudy, and the ending (or at least the final half hour) merely became image after image with a hint of visionary, but more rambled than complete. Was there an understandable ending to this film? Like the majority of this picture, it was just shock image after shock image, forcing you to make the decision - was this a story or merely a non-fiction account of this boy's life? While it could have been both - it ended up being the latter with poor subtitles and sub-par narration. I found myself watching scenes over and over again because our director would introduce someone new (see: BLED), not give us any story on him, and expect us to understand this boy's current blight. It was shameful and disruptive to what should have been a phenomenal story. Instead, it just withered away.

Our actors were decent, but with the mismatched direction their emotions seemed to be lost in the shuffle. I couldn't follow them, understand their hardships emotionally, but felt more like a child on a leash, forced to stay behind Valerka as he traveled all of Russia in about a day and a half. Whew. Wasted time for myself and for anyone else eager to see this film. I would recommend this film to anyone doing a report on life during the wastes of Siberia in 1947 - the photography is beautiful - but outside of this, the film itself just never fits well together. It felt like we were attempting to finish a puzzle with pieces from other puzzles, just jamming the edges in hopes to just get to the end. Found in my "Halliwell's 2007" book (the one with KING KONG on the cover), this completes my "Z" entry. With two good films, it wasn't too bad of a run. Alas, this last one is getting a yellow highlight with black mark. I never want to see this again, but would recommend it to ONLY the die hard cinephiles that could handle what Siberia has to offer.