Sunday, March 30, 2008

Madame Tutli Putli by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski

A silent, claymation film 17 minutes in length, but what an astonishing film!


A woman, carrying the baggage, memories, loves and aches perhaps of many lives, boards a train, a train that almost blows her away as it is arriving (the cataclysm of birth).

The train journey is the journey of life, one where we can look around in the compartment, but where the path and the milestones are not in our control. We have chosen a destiny, a destination when we buy the ticket, but how we get there is not up to us. Life is too vast and the future imponderable in essence.

And as she boards the train and watches the stations pass her by from her window seat, through the glass... The glass that gets increasingly blurred and dusty as the journey progresses. The glass is our psyche, one which colors every perception.

Two men, just above play a wondrous game of chess in which the moves are made not by them but by the jolts of the train. What a stunning analogy of life's events. The loser clasps his hands in desperation, and the winner congratulates himself. Both know that their achievement, or their loss, is circumstantial but still cannot help feeling what they feel.

Then she encounters a lecherous man, in what is perhaps the most un-subtle of her agonizing moments.

The train stops as if willed by some powers, and her perplexity and fear make her look out of the window. She is genuinely afraid...

Then it enters the surreal realm. You have to see it to experience it...

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