House of Fools | Review

Koncholavsky vaudeville freak show gives us a little humanity inside the stupidity of war.

What do Bryan Adams, the Chechen war conflict and a mental hospital have in common? Apparently, in the mind of Russian director Andrei Koncholavsky it’s a match made in film heaven. The bizarre tale and not so surprisingly, true story about those who are victimized by the cruelties of war and society makes great strides at giving us something different than a soldiers perspective. The winner of the 2002 Grand Special Jury Prize of the Venice film festival, The House of Fools is a sort of resurfacing from the director who has known a lengthy film career and had a couple of late 80’s hits Tango and Cash and The Runaway Train. The train is back, but a rather different kind of journey develops.

With the dreamy Bryan Adam’s hit song “Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?” as the main film soundtrack, this story is about the princess without a clue, stuck inside the mind of a child and inside a home for the mentally disabled. The chaos of living in a cash-strapped third world country hospital gets further impacted by the crossfire of activity outside the walls, and true to the nature of the war, it is ugly and bloody. At the center is this, is a full of hope Russian girl Janna (Yuliya Vysotskaya- Max) flavored with a talent for taking care of others, fellow friends in the hospital to men with guns. Thankfully she is cast among the non-actors, people who most likely spent their entire lives in such places. As the war rages on, she comes out of her vault and leaves her thoughts of Bryan Adams behind to get a taste of life, but only from a safe distance of a few meters away from the hospital’s main entrance.

With a film appeal that reminds of Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat, White Cat this small scale dramatic-comedy tale of wacky proportions is a hard watch, partly because of the madcap nature of the film but also by the fact that it the delusional heroine’s just doesn’t jive well with the seriousness of the war conflicts and the extreme conditions that the patients must endure. Perhaps the visual music is the cure to all commentary and Bryan Adams-fantasy afterworld could have been less emphasized in the narrative space and replaced with the thematic discussion of leaving people behind. The touch of placing the sane with the insane and the undesired bride to be context at the film’s end nicely pads the picture. Unfortunately, Koncholavsky’s direction bounces off the wall, subplots either take don’t take well to the main ideas of the film, basically letting the story show the suffering of war paralleled with being confined to a chair, a hospital bed or a challenged body form could have impacted the balk of the film.

House of Fools feels like that art film that is too into itself, especially with the coating of polka music as an escape and the accompaniment of the shift of colors from septic tank blue to yellowish signs of hope. In the end, even though some people ultimately don’t get left behind, the viewer might feel a distance because of the shape of the narrative and the banality that conflicts over the reality. Perhaps a bomb landing on the Canadian singer’s painful number or the destruction of the accordion would have made my viewing experience a little better.

Rating 1.5 stars