Twice Upon a Time in the West was one of the most anticipated Bulgarian films of the year, attracting audience interest mainly because it features Italian silver screen legend Claudia Cardinale. Coming away from the trailer and the uninspired plot summary, one might get the impression that the film is a languid and surreal postmodern western that blurs the lines between what we take to be real (that is, rational and probable) and cinema (where anything can happen). Unfortunately, Boris Despodov’s feature debut is nothing more than a clumsily assembled mannequin — one desperately trying to persuade its audience that its misshapen body, extra eye, and missing limbs are perfectly normal. More than that, the film tries to pass off its many imperfections as poignant artistic decisions, all made in the name of that elusive, ineffable quality which makes cinematic reality feel engaging and authentic.  

In this sense, the “film” can hardly be taken seriously. It is, in effect, bereft of a compelling plot, memorable characters, or, for that matter, any discernible idea at all. The action, if it can even be called that, unfolds in an abandoned Spanish town in the Tabernas Desert, once used as a filming location for Sergio Leone’s westerns. Claudia Cardinale, appearing as herself, is suddenly overcome by nostalgia and thus decides to visit this godforsaken wasteland despite a leg injury. At roughly the same time, Mila (our bland Bulgarian heroine) arrives in the ghost town with her daughter. The director tries to portray her as a tormented woman with a dark past, hounded by a sadistic husband who refuses to leave her alone. The only problem is that we never learn much about her, like why she fled to Spain, or whether there’s an actual human being lurking behind her eerie silence and sorrowful gaze, or whether she’s nothing more than an anxious emoji struggling to carry the lead in a mind-numbing cinematic mishap.

That’s also one of the reasons why the plot is so unconvincing—everything revolves around Mila. The head-scratching enigma of her friendship with Claudia, for instance, could only be understood with the help of some fairly rigorous psychotherapeutic work. And even then, the likeliest conclusion would be that the aging actress simply needs an “animate wall” onto which to project her inner monologue, itself little more than a chilling stream of disconnected facts. But be that as it may, the romance that begins to take shape between the young “cowboy” Alex and the lonely Bulgarian mother would probably lie beyond the explanatory powers of even the most perceptive therapist.

One would be hard-pressed to find much in common between Twice Upon a Time in the West and Sergio Leone’s famous works. On the other hand, one can hardly seriously claim that the “boundary between reality and fiction” (as the summary puts it) begins to dissolve merely because there’s a stock villain in the film (Mila’s husband, about whom we learn nothing beyond the fact he’s both evil and crazy) or because at some point a random, enigmatic Indian appears (a former film extra fond of weed and wandering the open desert). The “bad guy” seems to exist for no reason other than to manufacture a cheap sense of suspense, one that, in a better film, might actually keep the audience on edge until the final showdown with Mila’s young cowboy lover. The only problem is that one would have to search far and wide in order to find a more ridiculous villain in the history of cinema. In one scene, so overloaded with “dramatic intensity” that the viewer can only cringe, he points his pistols at some mysterious figure he is berating, only for it to be revealed that the person before him is in fact his own double…This “cathartic” moment is evidently meant to convince the audience that Mila’s husband is a fully fleshed-out character and a genuine threat (both evil and crazy) but unfortunately it makes him seem more like an obnoxious caricature.

All in all, the film fails to engage its audience on any conceivable level. The camera seems incapable of producing a single genuinely striking or memorable image, while everything else fits together so badly that the film comes to resemble a defective puzzle, laboriously forced into place before the audience’s uncomprehending gaze. In short, Despodov’s project is so misguided and ridiculous that, on awkwardly leaving the movie theatre, the viewer may realize there is simply nothing in it worth the effort of a coherent thought. Or else one might just end up exclaiming aloud, in sheer disbelief: “What the hell did I just watch?”

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