Gray one-take meander by a Caspian lake

In this arcane tour-de-force done in a long single take like Sokurov's Russian Ark (but without the beauty, glamor, history, and art), we begin with cannibals and end up at a little kite "festival" made up of university students camping at a Caspian lake in the grayest, gloomiest time of winter -- good for cinematography based on harmonies of dun with occasional highlights of color. Things start out very creepy and wind up meandering, time-warpish and strange. The total may appeal to those looking for new cinematic experiments. But a majority of viewers will find it a struggle to make it to the end, which is not arrived at till two and a quarter hours have passed. Mind you, all this is pretty strange and original in its way, but what it all means isn't remotely clear.

The young Iranian filmmaker Shahram Mokri, whose production values -- the smooth cinematography by dp Mahmud Kalari of A Separation, the one-take seamlessness, nice music (including a Serge Bozon-esque live lakeside performance at the end) -- show he has something going on, still seems to base most of the content on not-quite-fully-digested university student musings and jottings about dreams, memory, déjà vu, lost girlfriends, and news stories about menacing criminals (dead-end restauranteurs who may serve up human flesh). The students' wanderings never converge and the menace never delivers: the plot never develops a center or a focus.

Basically there is too much going on here at the plot level. Perhaps Mokri is interested in patterns of motion beyond the human, like Ramon Zürcher in his festival-celebrated intricate home movie, The Strange Little Cat. In contrast to the lack of foreground point, Mokri overstuffs the screen. First there is the non-stop camera movement. Then there are the overlappings, multiple encounters between new characters in which one of them engages in a voice-over about something unrelated to what the dialogue's about. Two things are gong on before we've grasped the point of the first thing.

And there is a succession of scenes that don't quite connect. First there are the evil restauranteurs, who regard lost car travelers as possible victims, but decide not to bother. Then you get the father who has a weird obsession with a girl from his youth he never connected with, who can't bear his son to be more than 100 meters away. Their parting goes on and on, with the two evil restauranteurs hovering nearby, and then the boy goes to the campground. There various university students turn up or are already present, wandering back and forth, some of them caught in repetitive loops of looking for a lost backpack or lamp or registering a newcomer's kite. Later on one of the evil weirdos approaches a girl and lures her out of her car and into the (dull, bramble-strewn) woods on some made-up pretext of a valve and a key and flooding. But she leaves him and goes back.

On and on it goes, with a gathering web of information about this kite flying event's history and some of the student's associations. But no theme emerges, other than providing fodder for repetitions of scenes/sequences/dialogue that suggest a time-loop. It's a purgatorial trap. Maybe Julia Loktov of The Loneliest Planet could have done something explosive with it. Gray, twiggy, rocky, boring, this sodden, lightly-fogged lakeside is not a place where you'd want to be stuck. Ultimately the perpetual motion of the camera becomes the most interesting thing, but you may wish it would hop a helicopter and fly someplace else. This is a busy, busy movie in which nothing really ever happens.

Fish & Cat/Mahi va gorbeh, 134 mins., in Farsi with English subtitles. Debuted at Venice. Screened for this review as part of the joint Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, New Directors/New Films, where it is the North American premiere, showingThursday, March 27, 6:00pm at MoMA and Friday, March 28, 9:00pm at Lincoln Center.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.