To return to your childhood home, only to find it empty — ready to be sold off, demolished, and forgotten: “Oh, hidden cries of a mournful stranger, idly recalling mother and homeland.” By and large, this famous line encapsulates the somber mood, radiating with apocalyptic clarity from every frame of Windless, Pavel G. Vesnakov’s latest project. Yet Debelyanov’s melancholic verses are still far from conveying the mournful essence of Vesnakov’s story, which unfolds with contemplative abandon under his skillful direction. After all, the mother of the main character, Kaloyan, isn’t waiting for him on the doorstep of his old home with a “gentle smile,” but is a migrant working in Spain, where she fled with him many years ago. As for his father, he is no longer in the picture. He has passed away recently, alone and impoverished, becoming a symbol of a collapsing patriarchal order, one clearly fated to disappear not only because of its own contradictions and shortcomings, but also because “traditional family values” have yielded to people’s selfishness and apathy. This twofold critique of both the old and the new is one of the film’s strongest qualities.

Given the circumstances, Kaloyan is forced to return to Bulgaria to attend to his meagre inheritance — a run-down apartment overflowing with old junk, which he treats with indifference. Under his mother’s instructions, delivered wearily from Spain over video chat, Kaloyan empties the apartment and burns almost everything inside in the nearest metal container. Memories are erased and roots are torn in a desperate attempt to overcome the past (or rather to repress it) in the name of some supposedly brighter future (or at least one that’s a bit more profitable). As we learn, a new motorway is set to cut through Kaloyan’s home, and the tiny haunted town will be transformed from a wasteland, smouldering under the grey, windless sky of oblivion, into a veritable Las Vegas (as one of his old friends observes ironically).

In order to make way for “the hotels, casinos, and spas”  all the land is being bought up and many buildings, apartment blocks, and homes are getting stripped out and knocked down. This, however, allows some of the locals — including Kaloyan, who’s set to receive 40,000 euros for his father’s crumbling apartment — to sell their dilapidated properties at a good price. The money, but also the hope that turning the town into a resort will bring jobs and development, blunts the increasingly bitter feeling that something is fundamentally amiss. Only the red tape stretched across the empty streets, along which Kaloyan roams in his scarlet sweatshirt, suggests that what is coming is not salvation but senseless devastation — a point further underscored by a poignant scene in which someone’s old household gets turned into a formless pyre. Vesnakov leaves no doubt that this world will probably never rise from the ashes of its own past. 

On the whole, when it comes to Vesnakov’s oeuvre, there’s nothing truly new in Windless. Here we’ll find all the leitmotifs he’s been examining with cool precision and existential fervor since his early work in Honor (2013) and Zeus (2015). The three most clearly delineated themes in his filmography are, first, the hardships of life on the margins of Bulgarian society; second, father-son relationships in the shadow of a declining patriarchal order; and third, the complex Odyssean dialectic of leaving and returning home. German Lessons, his feature-length debut, is devoted to the first of these, while Windless centers entirely on the last. Yet although the film offers little in the way of conceptual variety, one cannot ignore the fact that, at least in terms of aesthetic form, Vesnakov has surpassed his previous efforts.

Much of the credit here belongs to Vesnakov’s longtime DP, Orlin Ruevski, who has charted the contours of life in Bulgaria in a striking series of austere visual compositions imbued with melancholic beauty and elegant restraint. His task couldn’t have been an easy one, considering the “exotic” proportions of the frames in “Windless”. One to one (1:1) — a perfect square.  In the hands of a less able cinematographer, the format could’ve easily seemed claustrophobic and the “constricted” images it produces — dull, uninspired and sluggish. The only other film I can personally think of that uses a similar aspect ratio is Xavier Dolan’s Mommy (2014), yet even it does not fully commit to this potentially suffocating format, since halfway through the film the screen widens, “bursting” open in one of the most memorable scenes of the past decade. But whereas the Québécois director treats the square as a purely negative device — as a formal counterweight to the characters’ desire to escape their suffocating situation — Vesnakov and Ruevski succeed in drawing from it a much fuller range of moods and emotions. The shots convey both the relentless void of the pale expanse hanging morosely above the vanishing town and the domestic warmth that enfolds Kaloyan at the table of one of his father’s old friends.

The most problematic aspect of this otherwise impressively crafted film is the performance of Ognyan Pavlov, better known as the rapper Fyre, who, though impressive for a non-professional actor in a leading role, nevertheless pales in comparison to the rest of the cast. The problem is that the plot is built around a couple of monologic accounts of the past, delivered so naturally and with such force by professionals like Mihail Mutafov that, beside them, Pavlov’s taciturn character seems limp and lifeless. That being said, Pavlov’s ambiguous silence, coupled with his thuggish aura and blank blue eyes, succeeds in conveying the strong emotional dissonance that other people’s stories produce in the bewildered young man he’s trying to portray. Kaloyan reluctantly bears witness to the tales of a whole ensemble of memorable characters, all keen to share, in almost excruciating detail, their glowing, almost hagiographic recollections of his much-respected father. The experience is more than painful and confusing for someone like Kaloyan who remembers his “old man” as a harsh patriarch and a domestic troublemaker. Yet the weakness in Pavlov’s performance becomes most apparent at those moments when his character is meant to offer stories of his own. That’s when he seems most withdrawn and unconvincing. It can hardly be a coincidence that, as Kaloyan recounts one of his own memories — an encounter with a UFO that metaphorically foreshadows his fate as an “alien” abroad — Pavlov is kept off screen, while his weary voice seems to drift across the desolate landscape by the main road leading back to his hometown.

Setting aside these relatively minor flaws, which the director has evidently tried to conceal, Windless emerges as a mature work, uncompromising in the way it reimagines the archetypal story of the prodigal son through the lens of some of the darkest and most oppressive realities of Bulgarian life. Of course, one could argue that this is simply another tendentious entry in the wave of Eastern European miserabilist cinema, but in this case, given the film’s objective qualities and its conceptual departure from purely social concerns, I would set aside such overused critical gestures (even if there’s at least one character, whose absurdly tragic fate left me with a somewhat bitter aftertaste).

So all things considered, Windless emerges as a genuine artistic triumph, depicting the catastrophic existential impasse of contemporary Bulgarian life with finesse, empathy, and contemplative restraint. The only question, then, is which direction Vesnakov might take in the future, if he deigns to step outside his thematic comfort zone. What would one of his films look like if it went beyond themes of past decline and present destitution? In a certain sense, the real question is what comes after the death of God and the disappointment of returning home. Will there be new stories to tell in the future? And if the answer is yes, is Bulgarian cinema capable of bringing them to the big screen?

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