Reviewed by: Ludovica Anxley, Cinema Correspondent-at-Large
Dir: Sylvain Jasper-Fuchs
Runtime: 143 minutes
Language: Bulgarian (mostly whispered)
Sylvain Jasper-Fuchs’s Fragile Velocity announces itself like a bailiff and proceeds to unfold precisely as one might expect: slowly, beautifully, inexplicably, and, given it is of the new art house-action genre, with a fair amount of gunfire in a monastery.
Set in an unnamed Eastern European city, the film follows Ivan (played with blank intensity by Lithuanian glassworker-turned-actor Linas Drukis), a retired ballet dancer turned sniper. Ivan is dragged back into the violent world he once pirouetted out of when a mysterious courier delivers a cassette tape. He then spends much of the film searching for a cassette player.
The plot—such as it exists—is less about narrative than mood. Jasper-Fuchs structures the film around a series of increasingly elliptical action sequences. A brutal ambush in a crumbling opera house is staged entirely in silhouette. A motorway chase unfolds in reverse. At one point, a gunfight is interrupted by a 7-minute “Dance of the Assasins”, representing, according to the director, “the futility of death.”
That said, Fragile Velocity is not for everyone. Those seeking coherence, emotion, or audible dialogue may feel punished. The pacing is glacial, once halting altogether to contemplate the emotional life of a bullet. Action purists will be bewildered by scenes in which the protagonist pauses mid-swordfight to reflect on the epistemological failings of Google Translate. Arthouse aficionados, meanwhile, will likely choke on the inclusion of not one but three exploding helicopters.
And yet… there’s something magnetic in the madness. It’s as if Tarkovsky were reincarnated as a stunt coordinator and was told to make a film, in Esperanto, using only a fog machine, two pigeons, and a copy of Call of Duty.
The sound design, by legendary foley artist Delphine Quibbe, is worth the price of admission alone. Every footstep echoes with the memory memories of the end of holidays. Several gunshots sound like a cello being murdered. The twist, to my mind, arrives late and makes no sense, but the box office disagrees – this film had a huge opening weekend and will probably encourage imitators.
Audacious, preposterous, occasionally transcendent. Like watching a Chuck Norris movie underwater while someone reads Rimbaud into your left ear
