evolution & dream logic
I recently saw “Evolution" by Lucile Hadžihalilović. It’s a difficult film to describe —
It’s been pigeon-holed diversely as mystery, drama, body-horror and science fiction (just, I suppose as “Under The Skin” was). My husband gave it the best description I’ve heard so far: a fairytale.
But in reality it’s none of the above. Not really.
These are just labels and the work itself is so much more (complex / simple / entire) than something that slips down cracks between definition.
The matter of the story itself ebbs and flows between love and puberty, sex and fear, gender and parental alienation; but it never at one point rests for too long on an argument, even as it dwells agonisingly (seductively, disturbingly) on a single image, time and time again.
Leaving the cinema, those who were dissatisfied with the work were putting immediate words to their objections. (So many, many words.)
From what I could hear, their rebukes were not expressions of emotional response but rather disagreement with a perceived thesis; insistence on a polemic which frankly - although I could see how they might have made it out — remained in actuality, in the text of the film itself, only the shadow-impression of an outline of our own, personal inferences.
It’s a quiet work. A gentle work. Not without trauma.
And of course, not without provocation to multiple, idiosyncratic readings.
To each his own construction; to each her own cinema, of course.
To me, however, “Evolution” was a dream.
In much the same way as Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” was about all things in Tarkovsky’s life and time. And none. About nothing but Stalker and Writer and Professor. And Monkey. And the inexorable lure of the mysterious Zone.
Dream logic in cinema (in art, in theatre, in literature) provides fathoms on its own.
And analysis of dreams does not (can not) take the same form (pace, style, tone, subliminal resonance) as its distant academic cousins.
There is work that requires of us to leave it alone with our brains and our mouths, to instead let it seep insistently, gradually into our bodies — into the darker part of ourselves that knows things and knows things and knows things, without ever needing to know aloud.
