Juraj Jakubisko's thematically adventurous, visually arresting, allegorical drama is an energetically mounted film that can, perhaps, seem overwhelmingly kinetic at times! Frequently feeling like an unruly salvo of visual non-sequiturs and rapid, epigrammatic dialogue, but there is much bravura filmmaking to be discovered as Jakubisko's alluringly bonkers mise-en scene is anything but staid, and ace cameraman, Igor Luther's ceaseless invention is never less than exquisite to behold!
Watching the bawdy, increasingly surrealistic ménage à trois between gamine, Marta (Magda Vasaryova), handsome, self-destructive Yorick (Jiri Sykora) and the besotted, naive photographer Andrew (Philippe Avron) I couldn't help but recall the similarly galvanizing love attraction in Truffaut's immortal 'Jules et Jim'. Both films sharing an equally spirited, non-conformist approach to narrative, but with 'Birds, Orphans and Fools' I frequently 'felt' far more of the film than objectively understood it, which, overall made it an entirely fascinating existential experience.
The three young, altogether disparate adolescent lovers cavort uproariously, drink, make love and act the goat with a genuinely joyful abandon! Their desperately draughty, wholly derelict love nest, abounding in cheery chaos, amenably sharing their intimacies with an omnipresent flock of ceaselessly twitching birds. All this boisterously choreographed tumult careening to a rather grim conclusion that caught me totally unawares! I shall leave any profound political analysis to those with a more scholastic background, but for me, Czech visionary, Juraj Jakubisko's exhilarating, disorientatingly kaleidoscopic film is a deliciously psychedelic mind bomb. A winningly sensuous elegiac trip into an expressive, boldly uninhibited vista that one only really sees in the more exploratory examples of transgressive 60s cinema.
'Birds, Orphans and Fools' is an altogether edifying rush of hyperbolic celluloid pleasure! Not unlike 'Daisies' & 'Valerie and her week of Wonders', fellow Slovak fabulist, Jakubisko's restlessly vivid imagery percolates drug-like in the mind long after the celluloid reels have concluded spinning. I don't know exactly what it is about 60s & 70s Czech cinema that makes them so uniquely captivating, but so many have a singularly expressive, darkly mesmerizing melancholic beauty. Always inventive, and blessed with the most extraordinarily mellifluous and exciting soundtrack, Zdenek Liska's baroque, gorgeously uplifting themes are a constant delight!
