Swimming, sunbathing and floating around while the family falls into shards

Call it summerthouse: Lome films that make you long for the coming summer vacation in a highly artistic way. As Kyuka, Before Summer’s End: An exercise in the style of the Greek ‘Weird Wave’: Think of semi-incestuous family relationships, weird games and overall alienation.

Director Kostis Charamountanis is an over -style student from the class of master Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things). In Kyuka he brings our hearts to the sailing yacht of Father Babis and his cheerful twins Konstantinos and Elsa. Mother once went to get cigarettes and never returned. Quite understandable, because Pa Babis is closed, frustrated and moody and the twins look very dependent and infantile for their age. In a bay the father appears to have arranged a rendezvous with the disappeared mother. A half -sister also appears, as well as Ma’s new friend Dmitri.

Probably at least: the plot is a mystery, people do not say anything but Kissebist in metaphors and the soundtrack often consciously detonents with the image. While swimming for land, sunbathing and floating around, both the family and the feature film slowly fall into shards. After a dreamy interlude with aquarium images and poetry, Babis invites his sexual rival Dmitri to his sailboat to eat fish. There, the testosterone crackles about fishing in a heated, totally deconstructed fight: are you doing that with harpoon (DMITRI) or rod (Babis)?

The fact that fishing stands for more is evident from Babis’ pregnant preference for penis worms such as bait and his dismay that the fish no longer bite with him. During the fight, Charamountanis is in hectic form experiments: jump cuts, acceleration, delay, dramatic zoom, shaking camera, turning back, repeating. « Time no longer exists, time has swallowed us up, » a narrative voice explains that visual display of power. It seems to me that you can deal with toxic masculinity in a less artificial way.

Gondola

As evasive and thundered as Kyuka is, so simple, innocent and straightforward Gondolaincluded in the Georgian Caucasus. It is a wordless, pseudo-naive film as Veeit Helmer she made more since his much-praised film debut Tuvalu (1999). Helmer, who often films in the former Soviet room, connects with this village fairy tale in the tradition of Tati, Wes Anderson and Jean-Pierre Jeunnet.

The Georgian girls Iva and Nino – in their conductor suits they look like each other’s mirror image – a rusty old cable car that transports school children and farmers with bales of straw over a deep valley. With every crossing the gondolas of Iva and Nino come across each other in the middle, and soon the ladies slid out in creative gests. They convert their gondola into a car, steamboat or rocket, throw each other’s pomegranates, do serenades with violin or trumpet. It even becomes sultry. Obstacle for the budding lady love is their chef, a classic bullbak that occasionally pops up to throw a spanner in the works.

Cute is not enough Gondola to describe, there you have English words like whimsical,,  » quirky and two Needed. Did I mention that endearing kid and girl with braids playing glass organ, the man in wheelchair who learns to fly, the picturesque farmers who make music from the valley with singing saw and sink pans? The central idea – straps in the cable car – is somewhat repetitive by the end, the cute becomes almost unbearable. But Gondola Has already built up such a reservoir of Feelgood that you forgive the film a lot.

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