The shadow of the Maysles brothers looms large over the surprise winner of the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, a documentary that can’t help but summon up the spirit of the duo’s 1975 masterpiece Grey Gardens. That film told the story of two women living in squalor in the New York residence of the same name, revealing that they are not only mother and daughter but a part of the extended Kennedy family, aunt and cousin to JFK’s glamorous wife Jackie. Directed by Slovakia’s Miro Remo, Better Go Mad In The Wild makes Grey Gardens itself — the property, not the film — look like Mar-a-Lago by comparison, but it makes a similar case for not judging people by looks alone.
It’s more likely, however, that Remo was inspired by Dušan Hanák’s Pictures of the Old World, a similarly influential doc made in 1972 and banned in the former Czechoslovakia until 1988. Hanák’s film upset the authorities for seeming to show the impoverishing effects of living under Communism, a big propaganda no-no at the time. Nowadays, though, it can be seen for what it actually is: a sympathetic study of a rural generation that was left behind in the late 20th century, provincial postwar people that took their meager goods to city markets seemingly unaware that the ’60s had ever happened, never mind the ’50s.
Remo’s film exists somewhere in between these two movies. Its subject is František Klišík and Ondřej Klišík, a pair of grizzled, heavily bearded 60-ish twins who live in Sumava, a part of the Czech Republic known as the Bohemian Forest. Bohemian does not begin to describe the brothers, one of whom has a picture of the Dalai Lama in their kitchen, or the film, which is narrated by a philosophical bull called Nandy. Even their home is an unconventional space; after a brief heyday in which the brothers brought back women, it was split into two with a makeshift wall. The women stopped coming, but the wall remains.
In the meantime, it seems, the two men have made a decision to drop out of society and therefore time, living like a warring but loving married couple in a remote, crumbling farmhouse. But these are not two feral outsiders: as their conversations show; they talk about life and poetry in unusually sophisticated ways, despite their frequent drunkenness and their gleefully filthy hands-on approach to working the land. Nandy the bull gives the game away, revealing that the siblings, embarrassed after flunking school, became voracious autodidacts. Not only that, it turns out they were major players in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, producing anti-regime pamphlets for the Movement For Civil Liberty.
Remo’s film gives out this information sparingly, with the unfortunate effect that the film becomes a little wearing; if you’re expecting to see more expository backstory after this big reveal, all you’re actually going to get is a couple of mutinous old men living their authentic lives, no matter what. This can be fun at times; one brother, sauntering naked down a country road (there’s a fair bit of crumbly nudity), waves happily to a passing train then later rails against moles — moles! — for the crime of being “black, hairy, blind bastards”. The interstitial bickering, though, can become wearing, and when even Nandy notes that “the heat of their cabin fever is becoming too much to endure”, it starts to feel labored.
Though they do open up to the cameras, the brothers are never, ever put on the spot, and the film focuses more on their charming eccentricity than the nuts and bolts of their lives and how they can afford to live it. It’s an interesting trade. On the plus side, you get to men covered in cabbages, and having their beards enthusiastically sucked by a cow. On the downside — apart from a certain kind of countryside practicality about killing animals that definitely won’t make it this year’s The Truffle Hunters — there’s a feeling that something altogether more profound could have been articulated here. “Separating twins is like breaking a mirror,” muses Nandy, and the claustrophobic closeness of the Klišíks would have benefited from just a little more interrogation of that fascinating thought.
Title: Better Go Mad in the Wild
Festival: Karlovy Vary (Crystal Globe Competition)
Director: Miro Remo
Screenwriters: Miro Remo, Aleš Palán, based on the book of the same name by Aleš Palán
Cast: František Klišík, Ondřej Klišík
Sales: Filmotor
Running time: 1 hr 24 mins
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