Forest: I see you Everywhere is Benedek Fligelauf's follow up to his 2003 film Forest, which similarly describes contemporary urban life.
While watching this film I could not shake the feeling that it reminded much of the early Tarr. And this is not just due to the presence of his composer, Mihály Víg.
We are presented six scenes, all set during one, dark night, in dark, narrow apartments.
The handheld frames focus on the character's faces, almost shutting out the settings, and tend to avoid cuts. It's a series of back and forth jumps between faces. The improvisational style of the dialogues and interactions just adds up to the feel that we are in front of a film that looks back at the early tarr, especially Family Nest, similarly very narrowly framed and heavily improvisational.
What makes it all remind more of the early Tarr than Cassavetes is the bleak atmosphere: it is stories of broken relations but sometimes far darker and extreme than in Cassavetes, in a somewhat escalating nature, towards darkness: a father who may have contributed to his wife's accident, a kid fleeing his fanatic catholic mother, a guy worried about what happened to a woman he had an affair with, etc.
Most scenes are built around the topic of death, of fanaticism, dishonesty. Somehow mortality, in contrast with a spirituality pushed to the background, is central to most scenes.
Lilli Kizlinger won the Silver Bear at Berlinale for the best supporting performance, but it is really hard to make out one great performance out of the group. I really appreciated for example Juli Jakab's acting.
Although it's not exactly an engaging film, I found it to be an interesting experiment.
