ZIFT (Javor Gardev, 2008)

Pitched between film noir and film noir parody, the Bulgarian film Zift follows “Moth” on his first (and last) day and night out of prison, where he served twenty years for a murder he did not commit. Flashbacks stretch the film’s reach of time à la Mrs. Dalloway, but Moth’s present is headed for a hard limit. Javor Gardev directed from Vladislav Todorov’s adaptation of his novel.
     Beautifully photographed in black and white by Emil Hristow and meticulously edited by Kevork Aslanyan, the film is cold, nasty, brutal; Moth confides a summary of the course of his life: “Hell has already touched me.” Indeed, he is an orphan, and his child, who was born while he was locked up, died of lockjaw, the child’s mother, the film’s resident femme fatale, has told him. (This turns out to be a doubly twisted lie.) Todorov has a flair for language: “Tobacco-stained female voices”—but Moth’s voiceover proves exhausting to listen to. Todorov has explained that the film has something to do with the Communist world that Moth unexpectedly discovers upon his release in the mid-1960s, but in fact the “outside” world seems pretty much an extension of the world inside the prison walls. One can get a headache trying to make sense of this film.
     Watching it takes commitment.
     The film is unique, however, in at least one regard, inasmuch as it includes the reminiscence of a singular event to which a flashing image is suited. This involves the mass decapitation of a row of people—children, I believe—by a metal sheet from a truck to which brakes have been suddenly applied. I might have rewound the disk a bit to check the facts, but I chose instead to move forward. If that’s the phrase for it.