Review of Siberia

Another personal film from Abel Ferrara, looking back at his past with real life wife and son in the film playing some characters--here as a Russian girl and his son, respectively (as in his earlier "Tommaso".) Siberia is a meta-film with hallucinations that resemble a horror film (which it definitely is not) with 5 huskies pulling his sled in snow in one sequence and accompanying him to a hot Sahelian desert oasis in another. Clint (Willem Dafoe) is once again Ferrara's alter ego searching for philosophical answers to his own life thus far from his family and practitioners of the "dark arts." The answer he gets from one of them is that he lacks compassion, and that he should forego reason. A fish that he ate to the bone the previous night outside his burnt abode in the snow becomes alive the next morning in the same pan. Ferrara seems to accept a larger force that defies reason. One of his best films so far for me.