“NOVEMBER” My rating: C+
115 minutes | No MPAA rating
“November” walked away with top cinematography honors at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, and just minutes into this Estonian production you’ll understand why.
This is one astonishingly beautiful movie, a black-and-white evocation of a ghostly, semi-primordial past filled with haunting images. Director of photography Mart Taniel has created a visual masterpiece.
In other regards “November” is a rough slog.
Based on the book by Andrus Kivirahk — the biggest-selling novel by an Estonian writer in the last two decades — the film unfolds in a rural community in what appears to be the early 19th century. It’s a world of unwashed peasants, decaying hovels, mist-shrouded landscapes and everyday interactions between humans and the supernatural.
The novel was less a fully plotted story than a series of vignettes revealing the life (and afterlife) of a particular neighborhood over the course of one wintry month, and in transferring the narrative to the screen writer/director Rainer Sarnet has been unable to provide an emotionally engaging through story.
The film is a collection of sometimes arresting moments, but after a while the weirdness gets a bit numbing. In this regard it resembles the bizarre efforts of famed Chilean cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky (“El Topo”).
Jette Loona Hermanis, Rea Lest
To the extent that it has a central tale, it’s a love story (sort of) between the peasant girl Liina (Rea Lest) and young Hans (Jorgen Liik). When Hans becomes obsessed with the daughter (Jette Loona Hermanis) of the local baron, Liina turns to witchcraft to win him back. One of her weapons is the ability to transform herself into a wolf at night.
This doesn’t make her special. Most of the peasants have as their slaves creatures called kratts, stick figures made of wood and hand tools which become animated after their owners sell their souls to the Devil (Jaan Tooming). The kratts do household chores (they’re reminiscent of the broomstick men in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”); they also are sent out to steal cattle and food from the neighbors.
Early in the film there’s a truly eerie passage — a sort of Slavic version of the Day of the Dead — in which the peasants gather in a graveyard to be visited by the white-clad spirits of their departed family members. It is a triumph of staging and lighting.
But here’s the thing — like the folklore which inspires it, “November” has no room for psychological realism. The characters are physically arresting — all unruly facial hair and teeth like an untended graveyard — but essentially one-dimensional. After about 30 minutes or so it all becomes a bit numbing.
Killer visuals without emotional investment is ultimately alienating.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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