This movie was inscrutable for me at times but I loved most seconds of it. Premiering at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, La Palisiada is a police detective story where it feels like the characters already know what happened and the viewer is left treading water trying to understand what is happening.
Writer and director Philip Sotnychenko opens the film some time in the past few years in Ukraine. A young man takes a phone call in an apartment sparsely filled with plastic covered paintings and furniture. He complains about his father’s choice of windows. Windows will feature prominently, with several shots moving from gazing through a windowpane to the visually clearer interior where a scene takes place. The graininess of looking through a window matches the soft warm haze of VHS used heavily later on.
The young man’s an artistic type and so are his friends and girlfriend. They exchange ideas at a cool-looking house party. In the first hard departure from realism, we wipe into a news piece about his girlfriend’s art exhibit. The news reporter interviews her and discovers the young man, her boyfriend, hasn’t come to support her.
They have dinner at her family’s home. The young man discusses winning an arts prize and a trip to Florence. The young woman’s father has a bushy moustache and talks about their own family trip to Florence where he misremembers his daughter telling a waiter that her dad’s borscht is the best. This Florence talk seems like a clue to the film’s vaguely Italian-sounding title, but I could not decode it. As the young couple go to bed, a decorative alligator pillow sets off an argument. The more the young man talks, the more he reveals himself to be a piece of shit, and his girlfriend resolves the argument in a violent way that at this point in the film makes it seem like we are in for an absurdist comedy.
But that’s not what the rest of the movie (the majority of the movie) is. We go back in time to 1996. I somehow piece together that the murder of a police colonel has happened. We meet the murderer undergoing a psychological evaluation. He has a sympathetic face, manner, and skull shape revealed by his closely shaven head.
The murder is already solved, so the investigators reenact the crime and videotape their reenactments. We live inside the lives of those involved and inside their apartments. The set decoration and locations are impeccable, and we get to pan over the details lovingly, with our nostalgic longing. Reminiscent of Jia Zhangke at times, we spend long still moments with the characters where the camera is static. The warmth of the VHS gives way to the warmth of the vinyl they sit and listen to.
The young woman’s father shows up in the past. The grey from his hair and moustache is gone. Recognizing him felt like a breath of fresh air and gave me legs to stand on in my confusion watching. Novruz Hikmet has such a fantastic face for this role, it contains great perfect emotion. The whole cast does a flawless job creating a lived-in reality.
Hikmet feels like a safe space because I know him now and can connect him to the beginning of the movie. He calls his daughter who we know from the future on a mounted rotary phone. He breaks down softly when she says she doesn’t want to visit him even for one day. The phone has to be as obsolete as it to travel through time.
Near the end, a character starts discussing the title “La Palisiada”. I thought “Oh boy! I’m gonna understand this now!” I really focussed but I still could not piece it together. At one point, Hikmet’s character reveals his beautifully hairy ass so that his co-worker can inject him with what I assumed are drugs. This beautiful hairy ass was like a deserted island I washed ashore upon. A break from confusion. I can understand something as simple as a hairy ass.
He turns a bit and a woman in a picture frame moves slightly for half a second. Several times scenes end with a character turning their head towards the camera and almost making eye contact with the viewer for half a second. These brief hallucinatory moments inside of highly achieved realism made me feel like I was losing my mind in a pleasant way. Despite many moments of confusion, I really loved this film.
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