Savaitgalis pragare (1987)

The burlesque at the beginning with the two puppets in front of the bloodless and humiliated inmates in the filthy darkness is disturbing enough to make the Marquis de Sade riding his Marat with his insane companions in Charenton look like a picnic. In any case, in the most execrable of the degrading jokes that can be thought of, said beginning only foreshadows the most sordid of the possible when 2 of the prisoners escape, and in the worst irony that fate has reserved for them, they must camouflage their morality -hiding his feet lacerated by torture- with a select group of his German executioners who relax indolently in a spa. By then, Maestro Zalakevicius will have already confused the unsuspecting viewer with a bizarre, garish and overexposure aesthetic in his film as if the formal language presented us with a type of carnival story. Indeed, with the amazing, but above all sarcastic chromatic palette of moods and varieties of rationality of the plot to which we are accustomed, Zalakevicius plunges us into yet another of his disturbing photographic canvases that shines with a supine ambiguity, certainly very ad hoc for the wicked narrative that is supported by cinematography;Just like Godard with his rebellious acrimony a la Dziga Vertov or Jodorowsky with his theosophy, to give a couple of arbitrary examples, the Lithuanian aesthetic is in itself another voice, another specific instrument in the deaf concert of absurdity that he offers with these prisoners in the most brutal violation of their human dignity. Just on the run, listening to the bad jokes and jovialities of the enemies on the beach, the two Lithuanians remember "kiauras dienas gainiojom kamuoli.." (we used to play ball all day). At the infernal banquet of the Germans there will be grapes and fruit, they will argue whether they like peas or beans better, and there will be other riders enjoying horseback riding and one or another absent-minded person smoking imported tobacco with the pleasant background music of Chopin, whose country is worth less than a slave. Perhaps only the ending can be blamed on the director, who was weak and rather ambiguous to find himself in the middle of a war, especially after the arrival of the planes at the spa.