A Film a Week - Better Go Mad in the Wild / Radeji zešilet v divočine

 previously published on Cineuropa

How much should we hold on to what is perceived as “common knowledge”? When civilisation stops being a comfort and becomes a burden, or even an invader into our private lives? Do we have to follow the clichés, or we are allowed to make up our own rules in our own time and space? More specifically, regarding the latter, can we spend our whole life in only one place, without ever feeling the need to move somewhere and try different things?

Journalist, publicist and writer Aleš Palán asked those very questions in his book Better Go Mad in the Wild, which Slovak documentarian Miro Remo has now adapted for the big screen as Better Go Mad in the Wild. Like Remo’s previous work, the 2021 documentary At Full Throttle, this new genre-defying hybrid film has premiered at the Karlovy Vary IFF, in the Crystal Globe competition.

Twins František and Ondřej Klišík have never left their home in their Šumava region village, on the three-way border between the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany. They might have had their heyday during the 1989 Velvet Revolution, when they distributed leaflets against the communist regime and for which they have been decorated, but they did not build any sort of a career out of that success. Neither of them has ever married, as women had trouble adapting to the quirky dynamics between Franta and Ondra, as they call themselves. It also seems that they have never obtained, and even perhaps cannot obtain, a stable job.

Their long beards make them look like artistic types. Their “recreational drug-friendly” lifestyle (even their dog is named Joint) and their wild ideas also suggest as much. However, they have never reached fame and glory or even made something specific that could potentially outlive them. There are certain differences between them as well: František, who we learn lost his arm at a sawmill job, is more of a dreamer who thinks in rhyme but does not write his poems, and wants to construct a new flying perpetuum mobile machine without a blueprint, while Ondřej is more down to earth, but also has a strong appetite for alcohol, which is the subject of many of their quarrels.

We follow them through a series of vignettes over the course of four seasons in a year. During that period, we almost never see them away from their crumbling house and the farming compound surrounding it. František might have a habit of walking naked to the nearby forest, but we never see any of them doing so-called normal things, such as going to town to buy basic groceries, and neither does the filmmaker bother to insert some of the important biographical data about the brothers, which are almost regarded as pieces of public knowledge in the Czech Republic.

How much of the film is documentary or played for the camera's eye? Does it really matter? In any case, Miro Remo transposes us into the twins’ world through the observant cinematography by himself and Dušan Husár, while Šimon Hájek’s and Maté Csuport’s editing creates a certain rhythm in the protagonists’ lives. Theoretically, the classical-heavy soundtrack by Adam Matej should serve as the connection between the film's various passages, but ends up feeling slightly on the nose.

Better Go Mad in the Wild is the kind of a film that raises many more questions than it bothers answering, offering insight into a life that might seem unbelievable for many viewers. This kind of “anything goes” approach might appear mesmerising to some and frustrating to others, but it certainly makes for a unique film.