Windless

Original title: Безветрие

Directed by: Pavel G. Vesnakov

Length: 93 min.

Country: Bulgaria

Year: 2024

Premiere: Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2024

Synopsis: Kaloyan returns from the west to sell his deceased father's house.

RATING: 5/5

REVIEW

Timelessness. Silence, broken by distant noises. The beauty of dusk. Windless is the quintessential piece of arthouse cinema that conveys the east european experience, and elevates it to art.

Pavel G. Vesnakov's second film is immediately surprising, for several reasons: first of all, its brave choice of an 1:1 aspect ratio, extremely narrow and rarely used in cinema - a recent example is coincidentally of another bulgarian film Blaga's Lessons, but evne there it was only exploited for the opening and concluding scenes of the film; secondly, for who has seen Vesnakov's debut film German Lessons, it is hard to believe that Windless is directed by the same author - it is a change of course of the magnitude of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus.

Stories of returns to the East and nostalgic rediscovery of the past life are definitely not uncommon - as is the story arc of Windless. Yet, hardly the film feels unoriginal, or uninventive. Even if it exploits a very common trope, it is a film that feels entirely unique, its own thing. Windless leaves room for references to Tarkovsky, but in an occasional form that allows it to breathe its own air, create its own atmospheric poetry.

It is in the atmosphere, the form, that Windless finds its unicity: a slow pace that is never excessive, but sufficient to convey a sense of paralysis, of stopped time. A framing that is narrow enough to center exclusively on single characters, but that often opens up to beautiful stormy clouds, to Turneresque landscapes.

Poetics of silence, broken by endless monologues that become part of the atmosphere, a minimalistic approach but that leaves room for a sense of unspoken depth, both perceivable in the lead, rapper Fyre, starring in the most unusual role a rapper-actor has ever possibly taken on.

Windless has an inner quality of agelessness, despite it being centered on a moment of change, a sense of endurance that consacrates the film as one of the newest installments in the tradition of poetic cinema, and newfound Pavel G. Vesnakov as an auteur of outstanding poetic maturity.