FILMSICK'S REVIEW OF "KRISANA" (FALLEN)

FILMSICK wrote in Thai about KRISANA (FALLEN) (2005, Fred Kelemen, A+) in his blog:
http://filmsick.exteen.com/20071109/fallen

This is my translation of his article:

This article contains spoilers.

This article comes from Filmsick’s personal opinion and the conversations with Fred Kelemen both in the Q&A session and after the session.

FALLEN

It happened in a dark night, which might be too dark. Somebody wandered in a lonely, quiet, deserted street. He climbed up a stair and walked on a bridge to cross a river. The lamps on the bridge gave too little light to fight the darkness. Another person appeared in the small lighted area. Her fragile body was on the edge of the bridge. She turned her face to look at the pedestrian. What flickered in her eyes might be a cry for help, or just a glance, or the feeling of guilt for a sin she was going to commit. He couldn’t tell it, because everything was too dark. He paused to look at her. There was darkness between them. He walked on by, saying nothing. He walked from the beam of light into the embrace of darkness. Suddenly he heard a scream from far away, and the sound of something falling into the water.

Then darkness seized upon his heart and no light could enter it any more.

FALLEN tells the story of a man who happened to witness a suicide of a woman, but didn’t try to stop her. After her body disappeared, he started to search for her identity, creating the story of her life out of traces left behind in various places. And that led him to meet another man and some unpredictable secrets.

FALLEN was shot in gloomy black-and-white. Its location looked more like a deserted town than a real town. In this film, Kelemen reduced the bravura cinematographic effects and chose to shoot it simplistically. He used the story to tell the state of the characters, and that may make us overlook hidden meanings in each scene and may make us pay attention to the story which has nothing new. In fact, the story of FALLEN needs nothing new, because Kelemen hides the meanings in each scene which advances with deliberate pace.

Matiss Zelcs (Egons Dombrovskis), the main character, worked as a clerk in an office. His job was to deal with tons of document, compiling them and put them in the right places. He met a woman who tried to commit suicide, but didn’t help her. He did what he usually did, which was compiling documents about her or her evidence. He tried to create her story out of her traces, treating her life as if it was a document job which kept bothering him. After he told a policeman about what he had seen, the policeman told him about a lot of statistics on suicide. The policeman told him that we always wanted to get to know someone only after that person had been dead. What Matiss did resembled the police’s job—collecting evidence to find the cause of it all.

After that, he transformed himself from a clerk into a detective. He played a role which we usually see in regular detective movies. A woman disappeared. A man got suspicious and tried to find some clues and then he found the reasons behind the disappearance. But what makes FALLEN different from other films is the fact that FALLEN has asked us since the beginning whether what the main character did is the act of hero or just a deformed expression of curiosity and guilt.

He tried to trace back her trip on that night. He started from the place where she jumped into the water. Then he found a bar nearby and a barman who kept a handbag she had left in the bar. In the handbag, he found some unsent suicide letters, some trinkets, and a photo retrieval coupon from a photo shop. He read the letters and went to retrieve the photos. They were photos of a party, including photos of the woman, a man and a child. They might be her family. And there were also photos of her with a male stranger in the party.

He tried to imagine the story of her life and her death by using her letters and her photos. He created the story of her life as he wished, trying to make her into a flesh-and-blood character, instead of just a female stranger on a bridge. From that point, he started searching for the male stranger in the party, and got to know the whole story, which led to a shocking conclusion. The male stranger decided to commit suicide after talking to him. It seemed as if everything had come to an end. But it wasn’t like that. Because the woman (whom he believed to be dead) suddenly appeared.

The film seems to follow the full pattern of the detective genre. (Sometimes we may be reminded of the main character in Hitchcock’s VERTIGO, which also got involved with a ‘dead’ woman.) But FALLEN goes farther than that, because Kelemen lets us see the “myth” of those heroes in the detective genre.

Throughout the investigation, he behaved like an ordinary detective. He tried to make some assumptions from the clues. But isn’t it true that all these clues were full of gaps and holes, holes of flesh and blood and life? After he had gathered enough evidence, he started to criticize and judge her life and people around her. After he had picked up her photos, he watched the slides from the party. He kept watching the slides backward and forward, paying attention to the gaze of people in the photos. Then he uttered, “Pure jealousy,” when he saw the photo of a man watching his wife, who was watching the other guy. Matiss then became someone who judged other people by using just the data he had. His judgment was just a response to his curiosity. (He had watched the slides until he saw a photo of the woman going on a trip with the stranger, then he rewound the slides to look at them again. By that time, he had already guessed that she might have a secret lover and that her husband might get suspicious.)

He searched and found her lover. In an important scene, the lover told him about his relationship with the woman, while the camera circled around both characters in a small, uncomfortable bar. Then he judged other people again. He told her lover, “You don’t love her. You just want to possess her. You ruined her life.” His judgment brought about the lover’s guilt and ended in death.

Before that, guilt had already made Matiss interested in the life of the woman. He wouldn’t have had to go through things like this if only he had helped her on the bridge. But he was an archivist who spent most of his time with piles of documents instead of human beings. So it is understandable why he couldn’t make a quick proper decision when he suddenly saw a woman trying to commit suicide. (Kelemen said that in a Q&A after one screening, a viewer said that he would have helped the woman if he saw her, and Kelemen replied, “Everybody believes you would help her. But I don’t think everybody here would do the same thing.”)

So what motivated him is guilt. He felt guilty for something he chose not to do. His guilt is not so much different from the guilt of someone who tried unsuccessfully to kill another person. The guilt in this case doesn’t depend on the result of the action, but depends on the motivation to the failed action. The guilt of “wanting to kill” still remains with the person who had that desire, though the killing didn’t take place. Similarly, Matiss still felt guilty for not helping the woman, and that caused him to do other bad things such as lying to the police that he hadn’t seen her face. (He lied because he was afraid of his guilt and afraid of what other people, including the police, might think of him. His inaction transformed into guilt and neglect, and it might result badly.) The more he lied, the deeper he fell into the black hole of guilt. His search for the woman is a reaction to his own guilt, and also a way to transform himself into a “hero” who tried to bring the dead back home.

But his guilt and morals paid him back with the death of another man, after he had forced that man to feel guilty by using his moral principles. That man committed suicide in a toilet, maybe out of guilt, maybe out of drunkenness. Matiss’ guilt was not lessened, but multiplied.

The film satirizes the morals of the “hero”. We often view guilt as a good thing, but in fact it may be just a myth and has a very bitter taste. After the death of that man, Matiss, who believed in morals and ethics, walked into a church and vomited. This vomit in the church might be a too-late reaction to the death of that man, or it might be a satire to the fickleness of moral principles.

In that moment the woman walked out of the church, and his world came tumbling down. Her walking out of the place of virtues reflected very well his fickle moral principles. He had believed he was a hero, but in fact he was just a careless person who liked to judge other people quickly for his own benefits. He had presumed that the woman must have been like this or like that, judging her affairs with that man a bad thing. His doing is not different from ours, because we often believe that we are good and moral, and like to judge other people good or bad after reading about them from newspaper. We like to judge other people to prove our own morals and to bury our own guilt for our secret desire to be like the people in the newspaper. His using of moral standards to judge a stranger led to nothing except the increase of his self-importance. But the result of it is that he fell deeper into the black hole of his own guilt.

After that scene, we saw him tried to climb up a river bank into an empty space. We saw him falling back and climbing up again. All his efforts led to nothing except emptiness.

The film cleverly talks about guilt and redemption, and concludes them in the final scene. There are many gaps in this film, for example, we never know if the woman who jumped from the bridge is the same woman at the end of the film. She might not have committed suicide because she had suddenly realized the value of her life. We are not sure whether her lover was dead or not. (Because in both suicide scenes we never see the corpse. We only hear the sound of suicide and we imagine by ourselves what must have happened.) Death is not a way to redemption, and redemption itself may be just a way to satisfy our own personal desire.

If we step back a bit from the film, we may realize that the audience of this film is like the “hero”. We pay the ticket to watch the lives of others. We imagine the lives of these characters by using what we see on the screen. Kelemen said that whenever you use a camera to film something, what is captured by the camera is not the truth anymore, because the cameraman must select what should be inside the frame, and what should be left out of the frame. This selection makes what happens inside the frame a fragment. And no matter how many fragments we try to put together, we can never see the whole truth. Sometimes we judge other people as jealous person. Our act is similar to what the hero did when he watched the slides. We carry our guilt and sins within ourselves when we go to watch any films, and we hope that the films may redeem us. But films can only give a temporary illusion of redemption. They can only give us a little time to bury our infected wounds deeper within ourselves. But FALLEN opens these wounds.

The falling into sins in this film is presented by gloomy black-and-white images in which blackness occupies more than half of the screen. This film has many sound effects, but every song in the film is diegetic. We hear many noises whose sources are not present on the screen but exist in the narrative space, such as the barking of a dog, the chirping of birds, and the sound of a train. All of these noises create a realistic atmosphere, but also remind us of “the reality” of things outside the frame. (Kelemen is always very precise in the use of sound in his films.)

Comparing FALLEN to previous films by Kelemen, we may find that Kelemen reduces the bravura effects of his cinematography, and pays more attention to the complexities of the characters’ minds. The situations in FALLEN are complicated and strong enough to make an entertaining film out of it, but Kelemen chooses to use this story in the opposite way. He uses it to peel away the façade of these characters to find the hollowness inside.