A Film a Week - Call of God / Kone taevast

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Before he fell victim to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and a tragic personality of sorts due to the circumstances of his death (he died in a foreign place, in Riga, Latvia, a therefore was not recognized by anyone), Kim Ki-duk was somewhat of a controversial figure in Korean cinema. The thing in question were not his films (although, a tome or two about the controversies, the shocks, the hidden meanings and the ambiguous comments there could be written), but his on-set behaviour that included physical and even sexual violence towards the actresses, by himself or by his collaborators, so he was basically cancelled from his own country’s cinema and spent the rest of his life in different Asian and European parts of the former Soviet Union, where he also filmed his two final movies. “Call of God” is a Kyrgyz-Estonian-Lithuanian co-production.

It is questionable if “Call of God”, that premiered at last year’s Venice and we caught it at Belgrade FEST, could be called his proper movie, since it was not finished by him, but his Estonian colleagues led by Artur Veeber. However, Kim completed the photography process even before the pandemic and took his time completing the post-production, while also developing his next, Latvia-set project, before the illness took him. That is probably the main reason why “Call of God” is marketed as a tribute to Kim Ki-duk rather than his own last film, but, whatever is the case, it is questionable whether this particular film could serve as the filmmaker’s last testament and the ultimate proof of his creative genius.

Call of God is the story of love, death and dreams set in Kyrgyzstan with Russian-language dialogues. It opens with a young woman (Zhanel Sergazina) doing her mouth-opening routine in front of the mirror, putting on her white mini-dress and going out. On the crossroads, she meets a man, later known as Daniel (Abylai Maratov) who asks her, flirtatiously, to show him the way to the Dream Café. Since the place is close, she offers to walk there with him. On the way, her purse gets stolen, and he manages to catch a thief and get it back, sacrificing some minor harm to his body. He asks her on a date and she accepts, maybe out of gratitude.

Then the story is interrupted by a phone call to the same young woman, informing her that it is a dream and asking if she wants to dream the rest of it or she would rather wake-up. As it turns out, the voice on the other side belongs to God (voiced by the Uzbek-Russian actor Seydulla Moldakhanov), so think about the added layer of mysticism to the “Open Your Eyes” / “Vanilla Sky” premise to be on the right track.

The dream goes on, and so does the relationship of the main couple. At first, there is some reluctance, than it makes way for the pure passion. Soon enough, though, another sentiment takes the lead: jealousy. He is jealous of his ex-girlfriend (Aygerim Akkanat) moving on with her life with an older man, and she is jealous that she is not the object of his jealousy. There are other things to be revealed from their past, present and personalities, which eventually results with some indecent conduct, bad decisions and the necessity to hide from the world, to stick together, eventually spoiling something as beautiful as love.

Sure, the framework of a dream that turns into a nightmare (is not it a perfect, albeit too obvious, metaphor for every relationship that had to be broken up) is efficient enough as an alibi for many things, but is it enough to lock our attention to the one-dimensional, unsympathetic characters like those two? It is a bit hard to say, but Kim obviously had other things on his mind to deal with and to unload them into what it turned out to be his final film. Pinpoint something and name it whatever: it could be some sexually perverse fantasy (since there is a scene of passionate love-making on the gravestone of the dead girlfriend), it could be the auteur’s cynical view towards love, or a love letter to the French Nouvelle Vague cinéma.

On their part, the two young actors do their best to colour and to add some depth to their characters that are clearly envisioned as simple devices. Zhanel Sergazina adds some tactility and fragility to her character that could otherwise be easily written off as a psycho (oddly, a woman is not just a recipient of violence in Kim’s film, but is capable of inflicting, or at least commanding it), while Abylai Maratov adds some artsy swagger to the character of Daniel. The best part of their work is their interplay that does not seem (completely) forced, but more like a “follie a deux” in a nightmare world.

Behind the camera, however, craft components vary. Kim’s own cinematography in black and white (up to the point when he decides to add some colour to it near the end) is a bit referential (to the aforementioned movie history period / artistic movement) and more than a bit poetic, with perfect using of the urban and rural landscape scenery elements as framing devices. On the other hand, the editing is at times too choppy, but the final editor Andrius Juzenas is not the right person to be blamed for that, since he had no input from the filmmaker, and Veeber, actually a producer by trade, is simply not equipped with making filmmaking decisions, especially with such material. The main trouble with the film lies within its script and can be attributed to Kim himself: written in a language he is not fluent in, the lines of dialogues seem simply ridiculous, especially when translated to another language. On another note, there had to be a reason why Kim avoided the useful vessel such as dialogue so often in his films, and we might have just got the answer to the question we did not dare to ask…

It would be a fair thing to say that “Call of God” opens much more questions than it gives answers to them. It is not always a good thing, especially when it comes to those regarding the potential “method” to the artistic “madness”, and even more especially in the case of such a controversial auteur (firstly for his films, then for his life and finally for his death) such as Kim Ki-duk. It is a confusing, even perplexing ending of a story that defies logic, which is, come to think of it, very much Kim Ki-duk-alike.