“The
world spins, but they’re always below us.” That’s one of the many pearls in
Victor Kossakovsky’s ¡Vivan Las
Antipodas!, a high-concept travelogue that fleetly covers four pairs of
dry-land spots at exact opposite ends of the earth. The opening epigraph from
Lewis Carroll aside, Kossakovsky gravitates to such homespun maxims rather than
headier stuff, and the film is all the more dazzling for it – an intoxicating
riff on the Looney Tunes bit where Yosemite Sam digs through an outcrop and
lands in China. While he’s interested enough in the locals, particularly the
source of that comment, two guys who ferry busted cars over their pontoon bridge
in Argentina, the director generally turns his Red camera to beautiful images
of animal life, fauna, and architecture, weaving strange textures out of his
startling juxtapositions between, for instance, a volcanic rock formation in
Hawaii and an elephant’s hide in Botswana.
These conceptual
match cuts might have felt precious in less assured hands, but Kossakovsky comes
at his antipodes with a quixotic rather than a programmatic spirit. He’s happy
to capture accidental overlaps and stark contrasts of this sort without jumping
to inane grand statements about how we all inhabit the same earth. No such
editorializing here. Shifts between locations are signalled by steady rotations
of the camera – and occasional bits of digital trickery that see entirely
different skylines reflected in geographically distant bodies of water – which
throw us off balance, forcing us to cross that Argentinean bridge into an
upside down tunnel in Shanghai. If the material he captures is fortuitous, guided
only by a playful mandate to leave no strange cat or toothless dog unfilmed, Kossakovsky’s
minimalism and formal rigor are nevertheless unimpeachable. This is the
weirdest and maybe most rewarding film here. ***1/2/****
PROGRAMME: Special Presentations
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