Godless | 2016 Toronto Int. Film Festival Review

Just a Slob Like One of Us: Petrova Paints Bleak Portrait of Bulgarian Stupor

Judging from a recent slew of titles touring the festival circuit over the last few years, Bulgaria isn’t likely to be a popular tourist destination anytime soon. However, award winning items from the once Communist country by women directors have pointed to a resurgence of the cinematic scene, such as Maya Vitkova’s Viktoria and The Lesson from Kristina Grozeva and Peter Valchanov. Beating both of them out in terms of miserabalism, apathy, and emotional degradation is the directorial debut of Ralitza Petrova, Godless, which, on top of existing outside the notion of a spiritual deity also seems to hail from a realm without direct access to the sun. Taking both the Golden Leopard and a Best Actress award for newcomer Irena Ivanova at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival suggests a continued tradition of festival juries fixated on socially conscious dramas, no matter how impenetrably downtrodden the themes or characters. Those who cherish an endless ambience of despondent depravity may find themselves in for an unrelentingly bleak treat in a portrait suggesting you can take the communism out of the country, but changing a national ideology isn’t enough to reassert a semblance of humanity.

Gana (Ivanova) is a young physiotherapist toiling over geriatric clients in a sleepy mountainside rural community, spending her monotonous days washing sores and excrement off her clients. Her only real joy comes from morphine, an addiction which seems to bolster the only emotional bond she shares with her mechanic boyfriend Aleko (Ventzislav Konstantinov). Together, they deliver the ID cards Gana steals from her patients and sell them to crooked cop Pavel (Alexandr Triffonov), who spreads them around on the black market to people engaged in setting up fraudulent shell companies. When one of Gana’s clients gets uppity, Aleko steps into to scare her but ends up killing her. This causes Gana to reexamine some of her life choices, and allows for her to open up to a choir master retiree, Yoan (Ivan Nalbantov).

The real curiosity of Godless is why the Arturo Ripstein led jury at Locarno decided to bestow Ivanova with a Best Actress distinction for such a morose and formidably detached performance. With an expression always hovering near the semblance of a paralyzed grimace and her hair tied back carelessly, Gana wanders through the frames and her robotized criminality with grim determination. Even in an early sequence where she bemoans the lack of sexual activity with her longtime boyfriend, she seems to be uttering concerns she thinks she’s supposed to say. And perhaps this is what’s key to Ivanova’s performance, which is subtle and naturalistic enough to make a bid for neo-realism comparisons. Petrova gives her two significant moments, one a devastating reveal as she shares emotional battle wounds with Nalbantov’s Yoan, a tragic history which succinctly explains her current state of affairs and emotion. The second, a sex sequence between Gana and Pavel, which quickly becomes demeaning and abusive, is made all the more distressing because of the details Gana shared with Yoan. True, this is exactly the sort of unpleasant behavior one expects to encounter in Soviet Bloc dramas curtly dismissed and filed away under the repugnant label of miserabalism, but Godless at least aims to be more than an exploitation of contemporary degradation.

A shot of a monument dedicated to the victims of Communism, grown over with weeds, seems to be a rueful smirk from Petrova. Communism may have ended in Bulgaria in 1990, while the country joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007, but even a superficial glance at the country’s working class indicates progression hasn’t affected everyone equally. What’s quite potent about Godless, and what Petrova makes painfully clear, is how Gana’s awakening isn’t filtered through the usual unction of old-time religion, but through the discovery of beauty via music. The brooding hymns of the church choir directed by Yoan pulse forcefully on the soundtrack, and Gana, inquiring with the teacher how he came to be involved, asks if he’s a believer. “In myself, not God,” he curtly replies.

The film’s greatest detraction is the sulky visual palette, with DP Krum Rodriguez (who lensed both The Lesson and Viktoria) capturing glaring, often blurry close-ups of unhappy faces in front of gray-blue, wintry backdrops, making it difficult to become easily invested in these unhappy people’s lives. The brightest spots are the elderly victims of Gana, whose ravaged faces sometimes belie joy in their ignorance (or dementia), such as a woman who fondly remembers the invasion of the Nazis, a scourge she fondly recalls as respectful and courteous. But an off screen character scores the most poignant bit of dialogue, during the eulogy for the woman murdered by Gana and Aleko, the camera gazes on the forlorn faces of the funeral attendees, his sermon washing over them. “Any kind of living is a kind of dying,” he surmises. There isn’t a better way to describe the fading humans of Godless.

★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆

Reviewed on September 9th a the Toronto Int. Film Festival – Discovery Programme.
99 Minutes