A puzzle-box thriller so scrambled you'll need a drink and a timeline.
Director Leon de Winter has taken a thriller with political and psychological overtones, and scrambled it into a series of vignettes that are mixed-up in time and in location, thereby dashing any hope of following the story. A journalist goes to a southern European country to interview a well-known terrorist who has refused to stop his activities even though the revolution he fought for ended successfully five years earlier. Questions are raised about adopting violence as a way of life without at first realizing it and about the seeming impossibility of raising the consciousness of backwater cultures. Perhaps because of the way the story has been filleted into fragments, characters like the journalist and terrorist do not have enough continuous screen time to build up their individuality, a second factor that makes it difficult to become involved in the drama.
Direction
De Winter's chronological chaos is either genius or self-sabotage.
Acting
Leysen and Winkler do heavy lifting with fragmentary material.
Director
Leon de Winter
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
De Winter adapted his own novel, which explains the literary density—he assumed you'd read the book first.
The unnamed 'southern European country' deliberately evokes post-dictatorship Greece, Portugal, and Spain simultaneously, suggesting revolutionary disappointment as a universal condition.
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