When Anton and Eva had sailed off in the direction of Tuvalu, into a
sepiatone sunset, I got up, stunned, and asked a fellow audience member
The director... Who is this guy?
Tuvalu is a
romantic fantasy, directed by
Veit Helmer, who co-wrote it with
Michaela Beck. Short,
clownish, and
socially inept, Anton is the
Keatonesque janitor at a
swimming pool. The establishment is
bankrupt because the ticket seller Martha prefers
compensation in the form of buttons. Anton's father Karl is the pool's blind
lifeguard, fooled into pompously doing his job every day by a
tape recording of splashing swimmers, and his brother Gustav schemes to have the decrepit pool torn down. Eva and her father visit the pool to swim, and for most of the movie the extent of her involvement with Anton consists of him surrepticiously
sniffing her panties. A tremendous and practically
animate machine that only Karl can operate resides in the
basement and somehow runs everything. And of course theres a
map, and on it the
Pacific island of Tuvalu marked with an
X.
Cowed by his Father,
Boy meets Girl. Evil Brother turns Girl against Boy but in the end, of course, Boy and Girl set off for
paradise together. Its a conventional
plot, though exagerrated. However, despite their thoroughly predictable interactions, the characters are still
wondrous to watch. Like an
archetype in some traditional
folk drama wearing a
mask to indicate his
personality, Karl wears an artificially puffed out chest that extends a foot in front of his body. An
Evian commercial incarnate, Eva swims naked with her
goldfish. Martha takes
gum off of the undersides of benches, chews it up to soften it and uses it for glue.
Overacting is rampant, and there is no
dialogue- not a sentence, not even two words strung together, though each character does at some point get verbally introduced in a Me
Tarzan You Jane fashion. Helmer makes no attept whatsoever at
realism, so that the characters can and do utilize convoluted combinations of
grunts,
mumbles and
pantomimes in order to avoid speaking.
As an alternative to
narrative fim-making's typical reliance on declaration, Tuvalu assualts its audience with
images. This is not to say that The Image is an end into itself ala
Buñuel, merely that the
cinematographic atmosphere is so perfect, oppressive and intense that it filled my head for hours after leaving the theater. The film was shot in
black and white, and later colorized, a technique that evokes old
Hollywood, and which also allowed precise control over every detail and emphasis. Each broken tile in the bathhouse is evocative and contributes to a pervasive
clautrophobia; Anton seems like an alien for being so at home in such a foreign
landscape. Like
Brazil's duct
motif, here there are
pipes and tubes everywhere, as well as a shamelessly convenient network of
sewers and
canals seemingly connecting the swimming pool to open
sea. As a corrolary to that
setting, it's always raining, which only intensifies the visceral
relief delivered by a
dream sequence supersaturated with
reverse exposed color. Tuvalu is nothing if not deliberately made- every frame could be a
photograph- but it suffers from little of the
drag that often plagues films that are labled as "
visually stunning". Its a beautiful movie but its also funny, ridiculous, and bizarre.
Tuvalu
2000,
Kino studios (who'da thunkit)
Cast: