When director Veiko Ounpuu's film opens, mid-level manager Tony (Taavi Eelmaa) is at the head of a funeral procession, bearing an enormous cross. As he leads a group of elderly, bedraggled mourners, a small car leaps a hill and crashes behind them. The group continues on, nonplussed, as the bloody driver extricates himself from the car. The funeral is for Tony's father, and that macabre event seems to set a tone of despondent surrealism that defines the rest of the film. The bloodied man continues to amble through the landscape until Tony escapes into his expensive black sedan. But death is stalking him around every corner. He hits an animal in the road and dragging it into the woods, discovers a marsh littered with amputated hands. He is arrested and taken for inquisition at a nightmarish police station--just one of many disturbing stops on this gamboling odyssey in which Tony encounters a world of corruption and guile as intimate as his home and as large as the foundation of society.
With an opening quotation from Dante's Inferno, ("Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark.") The Temptation of St. Tony unfolds in a landscape that feels apocalyptic and amoral. Though much of director Veiko Ounpuu's film suggests an Ingmar Bergman parable, the film is also rooted in the vast disparities between those who rule and those with next to nothing in Eastern Europe. Capitalism has run amok, rendering some people disposable and overvaluing others, like Tony himself. Tony lives with his wife in a beautiful modern home, but it is set in the middle of a muddy, barren landscape. It is a place half-formed, which lends the film a dream-like quality beautifully enhanced by cinematographer Mart Taniel's silvery black and white photography.
During the course of the film Tony is forced to fire almost his entire factory of elderly workers he oversees. And he falls in love with the daughter of one of the axed workers, a beautiful young girl Nadezhda (Ravshana Kurkova), far poorer and more desperate than Tony. They become lovers, but her job in a decadent, cannibalistic cabaret the Golden Age--scarier than anything David Lynch might have dreamed up--conspires to separate them.
In an age of cinematic safe-choices, The Temptation of St. Tony is a shocker, both aesthetically beautiful and thematically devastating, transforming the world into a waking nightmare. Tony's is a world of human design, defined by harsh economic divisions between rich and poor. Rooted enough in reality to settle into your skin, The Temptation of St. Tony is a film that sticks with you, whether you want it to or not.
An official selection at the Sundance Film Festival and the International Film Festival at Rotterdam, The Temptation of St. Tony was Estonia's Foreign Language submission to the 2011 Academy Awards. Ounpuu's surreal odyssey in Estonian, Russian, English and French is clearly indebted to the history of international art house cinema (the director's credits thank Pier Paolo Passolini and Luis Bunuel), but has an impact and tone all its own. A play on the Christian myth of Saint Anthony who was also tormented by demons, Ounpuu's film is the story of a good man tackling a corrupt world, a theme also embraced as a painterly theme by artists from Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dali. Director Veiko Ounpuu was a previous winner of the Horizon Award at the Venice Film Festival for his debut film Autumn Ball (2007).
For more information about The Temptation of St. Tony, visit Olive Films.
by Felicia Feaster
