Indigène d’Eurasie (2010) (Eastern Drift)
Sharunas Bartas
French/Lithuanian/Russian

 

Eastern DriftThe trajectory of Lithuanian helmer Sharunas Bartas’ filmography, in a sense, runs anti-parallel to that of Béla Tarr, with whom the former shares a number of artistic, political and philosophical inclinations, and has moved from extreme stylization to rough-hewn naturalism, from near-total narrative abstraction to flirtation with generic structures, from semi-autobiographical meditations set against the backdrop of Soviet collapse to highly materialist tales of marginal lives in the Eurozone. (In fact, one could say that the exact tipping point occurs at Freedom (2000).) Eastern Drift finds the filmmaker moving one step closer to conventional aesthetic as well as dramatic construction and follows Gena (Bartas himself), who is on the run after he knocks off his Russian boss after an altercation over a hefty sum of money. Even though the film has the appearance of a Euro-thriller, with the protagonist hopping from one major city of the continent to another, each of which regularly gets its token establishment shot (and all of which look very similar for the untrained eye), it actually moves against the grain of the sub-genre. Unlike the traditional European action picture, in Eastern Drift movement – the prime action over which the narrative is founded – itself is problematized. A large part of the proceedings is made up of Gena trying to sneak in and out of buildings as well as countries and finding himself thwarted at almost every move. An antithesis to the utopianism of Eurozone and its myth of intra-continental mobility, Eastern Drift crystallizes and futhers Bartas’ preoccupation with suffocating national borders, although the scenario over which he builds his argument remains moot.

 

[Capsule added to The Films of Sharunas Bartas]