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"Feeling bad is a waste of time." Damjan Kazole’s Spare Parts is honest, brutal and often harrowingly intense. I just don’t know if that’s enough. Set in Slovenia, it follows Ludvik and Rudi, as they smuggle refugees across the border into Italy. The small, ugly town they live in, Krsko, is an industrial town that is dominated by the local nuclear plant. All the colors in this underworld are greys and washed out yellows and muted blues and browns. Apparently, there is no romance or humor in Krsko...
...and no way to get out.
Even the music that is made here sounds like a machine that is grinding to a halt and howling in pain. It’s an awful place to live and a grim place to visit, even if it’s only for an hour and a half.
Director Kazole has first hand knowledge of the world he paints for us. He’s from Krsko. It’s a little startling then how little compassion he feels for the place. I have no doubt that Krsko is as dark, dreary and desperate a place as what he paints here but is that really all there is to it? The movie is well made in that it is clear and concise storytelling, it creates a mood, it never resorts to cheating or easy emotionalism but what Kazole does choose to reveal to us is so unrelentingly bleak that it’s hard to sit through. It is, perhaps, an unfair criticism. It might not even be a criticism at all. After all, I’ve never been to Krsko. But Kazole himself came out of this environment and he became a musician and a renowned filmmaker. Surely, there must be something else going on there besides the unyielding hopelessness and ennui? There is a spark of rebellion or creativity or courage that Kazole himself seems to be a beneficiary of. I would like to have seen that as well.
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It’s not that Spare Parts is all one note but it is all in a minor key. When the town is not chewing up and spitting out the illegal immigrants that have the misfortune of making their way through there, the local nuclear power plant is poisoning its own inhabitants so they can corrode from the inside with cancer – of the body or of the soul. Much the same way, Spare Parts grows on your skin like a fungus. It makes you feel unclean in a way that you aren’t sure you can get clean again. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s what Kazole wants. But it’s not necessarily what I want to experience. It feels like a horror movie without the thrills, a tearjerker with no tears, a sermon without a mission in mind. At the end of the film, a circle has completed itself, a cycle has begun anew. I don’t have to be Captain NPR to feel like I understood that process before I ever sat down. |
| The only place in Krsko to find anything resembling vibrancy is at the motorcycle racetrack. It is on this racetrack that, years ago, Ludvik had his only moments of glory. But those days are long in the past. And now for him, there is only trafficking in desperate people and waiting to die from cancer. In that respect, he’s still better off than his young partner, Rudi, who, it seems, will never enjoy a zenith similar to Ludvik’s heady days of motorcross. Depravity and desperation have found their way into his life too soon. What little moral fiber he has is eroded away rather quickly. When he finds some semblance of human contact, she is the rejected girlfriend of a motor cross champion throwing up in the racing club bathroom. Yup. That’s the high point of Rudi’s life as we see it or know it. The rest of the movie amounts to a series of vignettes that pound away at Rudi’s humanity, leaving him without a soul and terrifyingly efficient at what he does for a living. |
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The acting is uniformly solid and like the rest of the film, effective without flourish or self-consciousness (a standout is Verica Nedeska as the doomed Ilinka). Often, they don’t feel like actors at all. They’re real humans living out all too real situations. Likewise, the camera doesn’t comment or cast judgment. The scenes fit together not seamlessly, exactly; more like the pieces of a puzzle that isn’t about mystery. All of this is what is right with Spare Parts. But similar ground was trod in Fernando Meirelles’ City of God and Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre and there was still grace and verve in the filmmaking and a little romance in the soul of the people who populated those films. Not so here.
Perhaps that’s inevitable because of the approach to the story that is taken. Kazole concerns himself less with the plight of the refugees and instead turns his focus on those making money off of them. It sounds simple but it’s an arresting choice. These guys would be villains in any other movie but here, they’re humans. The realities of economic depression paint the paths between and good and evil with a few more shades of grey. It’s a dank ugly spot of the soul to be stuck in. To be involved in this trade, you don’t even have to be especially depraved, apparently. You just have to have nothing else going on in your life. That kind of petty misery is tough to sit through. These men are lonely to the point of grotesqueness. Their living spaces, like their lives, are empty and ugly. The entire film all bends towards this one reality. The palette Kazole works with shifts from sepia dreary to colored dreary. The movie moves along at a steady pace, never seeming to speed up or slow down, just happen. Even when something good might happen, Ludvik casually dismisses the possibility. It’s hard. The whole movie is hard. Maybe it’s just that after Crash and Babel and Traffic and 21 Grams and Syriana and any number of other films all of the space inside of me for this kind of film is taken. People are miserable and we're all to blame. I get it. I do.
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It’s strange. I can’t remember the last time I felt I was having so much trouble keeping myself out of the review. This is a good movie. It’s well-made. It’s honest. I just didn't like it. I watch this film and I’m like “what did Damjan Kazole want me to come away with?” But then again, maybe I’m just too used to easy answers to that question.
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