The hills are alive, with the sound of music (also mastication and the moaning of zombies) in Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska’s experimental, dialogue-free, home-movie-style riff on Elfriede Jelinek’s “Die Kinder Der Toten” (The Children of the Dead). A seminal text in Jelinek’s native Austria, the 1995 book has never been translated into English, and so the directors, who are part of New York-based performance group the Nature Theater of Oklahoma were reportedly working from a sort of CliffsNotes version of this sprawling, complex, metatextual novel — one that had hitherto been dubbed “unfilmable.”
That’s an assessment barely contradicted by Copper and Liska’s tiresome adaptation, which starts out buoyantly inventive but quickly turns grating, its one-joke premise wearing thinner as the grotesquerie is layered on thicker. Initially, however, it provides an aesthetic surprise, shot in deliciously grainy Super-8 footage, set to Wolfgang Mitterer’s bizarro-folksy score and...
That’s an assessment barely contradicted by Copper and Liska’s tiresome adaptation, which starts out buoyantly inventive but quickly turns grating, its one-joke premise wearing thinner as the grotesquerie is layered on thicker. Initially, however, it provides an aesthetic surprise, shot in deliciously grainy Super-8 footage, set to Wolfgang Mitterer’s bizarro-folksy score and...
- 4/19/2019
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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