Posetitel muzeya

In Letters from a Dead Man director Konstantin Lopushanksy tinted much of the background yellow. In A Vistor to a Museum, the director applies a red tint to much of the film. The end result is often hypnotic. A traveler arrives at a hellish outpost in the Russian landscape. This wasteland is where the rest of the country sends its garbage. Mountains of trash are piled high. The surrounding ocean is dead, the result of chemical waste. Somewhere in the horizon mutants, called "degenerates," reside on a reservation. The local tavern lights fires at night (more red) to keep the degenerates away. The traveler has come to visit a flooded museum. For one week a year, the tide departs and one can walk the ocean floor. The visitor plans to travel the three days to the museum and the three days back during this period of no tide. The locals think he is crazy, but the visitor must make this journey. He is searching for a mound inside the museum that is rumored to be a portal to another world.

Andrei Tarkovsy fans may note the similarity to Stalker. Like in that film, the protagonist lives a depressing existence and only has his faith in a rumor, a legend, to keep him going. A Visitor to a Museum is good but not as good as Stalker (incidentally, one of my favorite films). Konstantin Lopushansky worked on the crew of Stalker and he is trying to direct this film as Tarkovsky might have. The difference is that Lopushansky is a gifted, intellectually minded stylist while Tarkovsky was a true poet of the cinema, one of the medium's great voices.

To his credit, Lopushanksy conjures up some amazing images. My personal favorite is the degenerates carrying the visitor to the water's edge. I also loved the landscape shots which, like Stalker, convey a world off-kilter. The last shot is also very memorable. The director is less successful with telling his story. That last shot, visually stunning though it is, leaves the viewer unsure of what to take away from the film. The entire final half-hour (the journey across the ocean floor) is ambiguous. Something life changing happens to the visitor toward the end of the film, but I was not exactly sure what it was. What did the ending mean? Got me!

Despite its ambiguity, A Visitor to a Museum grabbed me. I felt like this was one of the most rewarding science fiction films I had seen in some time, a film that created a distinct and unique world. My mind is still replaying some of this images from the film two weeks after viewing. I shake my head thinking of all the films that are forgotten as soon as their end credits roll.

Made in 1989, a few years after Dead Man's Letter, this film contains some similarities: a post-apocalyptic world where civilisation has collapsed, in this case because of ecological catastrophe. The ecological catastrophe is the result of man's careless treatment and overexploitation of nature. All that remains is a barren landscape (not a tree to be seen), pollution and lots of rubbish.

Like the earlier film, it is shot with a very limited colour gamma, mostly dark reds and blacks. I found it easier to see the point of Dead Man's Letters. The Museum Visitor has several very powerful scenes, but it is harder to se it as a coherent whole.

The film's hero is a "tourist" who travels to see a museum that can only be reached when the seas part. He is one of the few human left who still keep the old attitude and way of thinking. More numerous are some kind of mutants or idiots (most indeed played by people with real disabilities) who live in reservations in some kind of permanent religious exaltation. Normal, intelligent humans are sceptical atheists, and keep the idiots away, inter alia by lighting fires on their windowsills. However, even the normal world has been turned upside down, and thus for example the new fashion dictates that men wear high heels and tights. An old man at an inn asks the tourist to close his eyes and open the scriptures at random and point at a paragraph. But nobody is able any longer to understand the meaning of the scriptures. The world is too far gone, too close to the end to be able to appeal to any gods.

While trying to reach the museum, the "tourist" undergoes a profound deep transformation and ends up on his own via crucis.

I would hesitate before recommending this very tough, depressing film, except to those who have enjoyed other films by the same director.

Based on the few things I'd read about A Visitor to a Museum, I expected something quite different from what I ended up getting. It's generally described as a bleak post-apocalyptic movie set after a catastrophic environmental disaster on a global scale, and that much is true.

The premise is also said to be about a man who sets out on a mission to visit an old museum that's now underwater, and only accessible for short periods of time when the tide is super low. That plus the title made me think a lot of this film would be the main character visiting an old, decrepit museum that's who knows how old, but that isn't a big part of the movie.

I guess what the film's going for is still fairly engaging, but definitely not as intriguing. It mostly revolves around the main character being torn between the two factions that this dystopian society has been divided into, and that can be an interesting conflict for sure.

The film has plenty to say about then state of the world, how people treat each other, religious beliefs, and what could happen after a world-ending disaster. It's got an oppressively bleak atmosphere and there's usually something interesting to look at or think about, but it is quite slow-moving in parts.

I'm a little disappointed it's not what I expected, but also having that expectation is on me in the end. I think this is still pretty good for what it is, even if it's more about post-apocalyptic societal division than a strange Russian museum tour. At least there's always Russian Ark for the latter.

I've seen it once on a festival, at the time it came out, and I was impressed. Would love to see it again, but it doesen't seem to be published in the western Europe.

I don't remember much of it nowdays, but the main idea was that there is a forgotten underwater museum somewhere in the sea!

So the main characters go in search for it. There are a lot of horrific scenes with a great number of real mentally retarded people, and it takes some bravery to watch it, but, at the end the film can be compared to the ones of Tarkovsky.

The visuals are amazing, the themes in it are interesting and relevant in many ways. However, this one was a bit too preachy and overstretched for my taste. This film isn't subtle by any means and sometimes even crosses over to the horror genre.