a fractured youth, tempted by the flight from the west

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED

We like to get lost in the paths of Walden, in the deep emerald of the eponymous lake, place of refuge and fantasy of all utopias… In her third feature film, the Czech filmmaker, of Bulgarian origin, Bojena Horackova, probes the desires of Lithuanian youth in 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Assuming reference to Walden or Life in the Woods (1854), autobiographical story by the American Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), on the banks of a pond in Massachusetts, the director and screenwriter sketches mental, geographical and temporal trajectories, on the borders of dreams and buried memories .

In Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, a group of high school students meet at the ice rink after class. Longtime friends, Jana (Ina Marija Bartaité) and Lukas (Mantas Janciauskas) plan to study architecture, with the hope of a freer life. Paulius (Laurynas Jurgelis) is a boy apart, who does not believe in change and wants to flee to West Germany. To raise the necessary money, he works on the black market, exchanging local currency for dollars for passing tourists. A little wind of freedom has already disheveled her hair, a ring in her ear emphasizing her rock, slender silhouette.

Jana and Paulius soon form an attractive couple, on the margins, the boy coming to pick up his girlfriend by car, a luxury in the former Soviet bloc. Won over, Jana begins to follow Paulius in his schemes. But the two accomplices are spotted and go to hide on the edge of a lake, which they think cannot be found… In a few lines of dialogue, the director brings an entire era to life, membership (or not) of the Communist Party drawing the lives and careers. Apart from a few inquisitive policemen, the leaden screed of power remains off-screen, as does the new musical scene whose existence the film suggests.

Fabulous crossover of scenes

In its silences and its ellipses, Walden appears as a “negative” of the electric Leto (2018), by Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, a portrait of the Leningrad rock scene in the early 1980s. Bojena Horackova’s film mainly echoes Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), by Jonas Mekas (1922-2019), an autobiographical essay in which the filmmaker of Lithuanian origin, exiled in the United States, films his return to his native country, in a vibrant countryside. Plastically sumptuous, Walden was selected at Cannes, in 2020, by the Independent Cinema Association for its distribution, Acid.

You have 44.1% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.