Ecce homo is an exceptionally well-crafted film directed by the up-and-coming filmmaker Dimitar Kutmanov. Within its brief runtime, the work deftly succeeds in outlining and masterfully conveying a remarkably complex set of eschatological themes, while relying almost entirely on what is most essential to cinema: images. Words are given little attention, yet in terms of significance and depth they carry the same weight as all of the film’s other major components. The short bursts of speech the viewer encounters (a dialogue at the beginning and a monologue at the end) become key focal points in the film’s structure by encapsulating the unique existential atmosphere of the events on screen. The lines carry a distinctive aesthetic force, reminiscent of the poetic language of surreal cinema, which allows them to fill the remaining nearly twenty-five minutes of silence with their lingering echo.

The plot of Ecce homo revolves around the harsh daily life of Ada — a religious young woman responsible for the care of her sick mother and the household they share. Judging by the opening, the film is set in some unnamed village in socialist Romania. We see a middle-aged man, who is clearly in a position of power, interrogating Ada about the nature of her religious beliefs. When she confesses that she is indeed a Christian, he instantly reprimands her, launching into a caustic tirade that reveals his radically anthropocentric worldview. He attempts to forcefully impose his self-serving, egotistic outlook that sees man (and above all his powers of reason) as the measure of all things. According to him, everyone arrives in this world alone, lives alone, and dies alone. Others are an insignificant fact. They are useful only insofar as they might satisfy one’s personal needs and desires or contribute to the general well-being of society.

Ada’s daily life functions as an organic counterpoint to this chilling perspective. The young woman humbly bears the cross of her hard existence with a starkly unbearable lightness of being. It is as if the weight of the whole “creaturely world” rests upon her shoulders, recalling the famous line spoken by Elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov: “Each of us is guilty before everyone, for everything.” In a way it also echoes Ivan Ilyin, who argues in his essays that, as a person matures, they inevitably come face to face with a deep Weltschmerz. When that happens they are called upon to confront this pain and to accept responsibility not only for their own sins, but for the world’s as well, thus becoming Christ-like.

These Christian themes are further developed by the director in a striking scene whose mood and texture can be readily compared to those of a film like Stalker. As Ada wanders among the trees through a deep marsh, dressed in white, wearing a crown of thorns, she slowly but surely sinks deeper and deeper into the water. The beautiful sequence functions as a kind of metaphor for the nature of creation and the precarious place of saintly people in the world. It reaches its peak when the girl, already chest-deep in water, meets her mother, who removes her “crown” and pours water over her head. After this dream (or vision), Ada discovers that her mother has died in her bed. This is how Kutmanov guides the viewer toward the existential core of each Christian’s personal cosmology: the dimension of the eschatological, which lies at the centre of being, well beyond life and death. As Ada washes the feet of her deceased mother, the girl begins an interior monologue that makes it painfully clear where this seemingly fragile creature draws her tremendous strength from.

Ada candidly shares her thoughts on what the “last day” will look like. She conjures up a shattering apocalyptic tableau whose force and certainty carry the weight of a prophetic revelation, one granted to her for the humility with which she accepts the world as it is, without buckling under the pressure of its fallenness. She places herself among the “people with no faces”, the forgotten and the dispossessed, the “humiliated and insulted”, who live in darkness and rely entirely on the paradoxical strength and beauty of their powerlessness, clinging to a single hope — that one day they will become like the fire that burns brightly beyond the clouds and the horizon.

In her radical self-renunciation, Ada turns away from the ecstatic, animal conviction that happiness is something to be found here and now, a mere thing subordinated to our own aims and desires. In this sense she “loses her soul” so that she might ultimately regain it. The film creates the impression that when and if that happens, perhaps God will repeat Pontius Pilate’s famous words, in order to reveal the one who fought for (and alongside) humankind in the darkness — the one who carried the world, with all her love, like a cross on her back. The words will resound in eternity: “Ecce homo.” 

Материалът е изготвен
с финансовата подкрепа
на Националния фонд „Култура”.