Under these impossible circumstances - where bureaucratic delays keep people from doing their jobs, and even the best intentions have a way of going awry - it’s no surprise that humor becomes a crucial coping mechanism here, even if “A Perfect Day” never manages to be as fresh, funny or clever as it seems to think it is. One of the film’s running gags/tension generators finds our heroes facing a dead cow in their path - a carefully planted piece of roadkill, per B, meant to divert cars in a potentially explosive direction. Alex Catalan, with Spanish locations including Granada, Malaga and Cuenca ably standing in for the Balkans). When it becomes clear the situation isn’t considered a priority, it falls to the ragtag Aid Across Borders crew to try again, which turns out to be much easier said than done: The locals are distrustful and unhelpful finding a strong-enough length of rope becomes a difficult quest in itself and land mines are a constant threat as the workers navigate winding roads over miles of mountainous desert terrain (well lensed in crisp, scenic digital images by d.p. to retrieve the body and decontaminate the well.
Joined by their colleagues Sophie (Melanie Thierry) and B (Robbins), Mambru and Damir head to a briefing at a nearby United Nations base, where untested, idealistic newcomer Sophie urges the U.N.
It’s a blunt but effective metaphor for a situation where violence, chaos and cynicism seem to hold permanent sway over residents and visitors alike, and where every attempt to restore order inevitably yields a struggle of near-Sisyphean proportions. Mambru (Del Toro) and Damir (Fedja Stukan), who work for a humanitarian NGO called Aid Across Borders, are trying to hoist the body out of the well as the film opens, but the rope quickly snaps and the corpse falls back into the water, where it will continue to fester and pollute.
The crisis that drives “A Perfect Day” over its roughly 24-hour span is the discovery of a man’s corpse in a well, contaminating one of the few precious water sources available to nearby villagers.
0 kommentar(er)
