EUPHORIA

The established playwright Ivan Vyrypaev adeptly leaps from stage to screen with his director’s debut EUFORIA, a film whose main protagonist is indomitable nature. The camera sweeps over a seemingly endless, barren steppe, ant-like people crawling among the swaying grasses. The intricate web of ditches, rivers and dusty tracks gives the landscape the appearance of an ancient, long-suffering creature for whom humankind is a transient phenomenon, no more important than the grass or the rain clouds. The few people who live there do not make life easier for each other. Surly and vicious, they veer between blind rage and fatalistic resignation, numbing their wretchedness with alcohol to keep the thoughts at bay. Given the harshness of this setting, the love that springs up between childishly naive Vera and impulsive Paša seems like a glimmer of hope. Vera lives with her husband and daughter in a barely furnished shack. One day, Paša arrives and declares his love. The tenderness between them does not alter the course of outside events: Vera’s infant child is savaged by a dog, her husband Valery drinks himself senseless and finally turns violent. As runaways, Vera and Paša experience moments of pure happiness before everything falls apart around them, putting an end to the illusion that mere love could be powerful enough to thwart the eternal cycle of birth and death, or lend two human beings significance beyond their brute existence. All the same, a sense of freedom lingers even in defeat – life is a sensual and existential torrent into which we deliriously leap to our doom. German premiere.