I’m not entirely sure that I’m qualified to review The Fourth Dimension. That’s not a shot at myself because I’m not sure anyone really is. Any film that opens with quotes from Einstein, Eisenstein, and Back to the Future is likely to be hard to review because you’re not in for a typical movie experience.
The Fourth Dimension is an anthology film made up of three segments that are approximately 35 minutes each. 35 minutes should be enough time to tell a narrative. After all, a majority of short films are shorter than 35 minutes, and I’ve been a longtime critic of movies that appear to have stretched their stories just enough to fit the length requirements of a feature. But the oddest thing about The Fourth Dimension is that each of the three segments are overlong.
For example, take the first segment, The Lotus Community Center. By far the most entertaining (but not necessarily the best), this segment features Val Kilmer as himself if he were a motivational speaker turned up to eleven. Kilmer’s presentation style is somewhere between new age preacher and psycho prophet, particularly when he rants to his audience at the roller rink about how the fourth dimension is like cotton candy. Cut between Kilmer’s insane and often hysterical ranting are segments where he rides his bike, plays a recorder, swims, and plays video games with a young, possibly underage, woman. So there’s a contrast between hyper ranting Kilmer and creepy, lazy Kilmer who isn’t quite adhering to his over-the-top motivational advice. As I said, this is entertaining, but would be so much more so as a 5 or 10 minute skit on a comedy show. Stretched over 35 minutes, one has to wonder if the director for this segment, Harmony Korine (best known as the writer of Kids) had any other plan except for having Kilmer go batshit crazy.
While the second segment, Chronoeye, actually has a story — a Russian scientist named Grigory Mikhailovich (Igor Sergeev) is working on a time machine that allows him to briefly peer in the past through the eyes of someone else — it is also overlong. Roughly a third of the segment directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko is devoted to Mikhailovich’s frustration with both the machine not producing the results he expected and the noise made by Valya (Darya Ekamasova), his upstairs neighbor who is a dancer with crush on him. Mikhailovich is searching for something in the past that he is unable to let go of, which isn’t entirely clear. There’s some excellent camerawork in this segment and Mikhailovich’s disconnect from enjoying his life is compelling, but there’s just not enough from the two characters to sustain the segment for its length.
The third and last segment is Fawns, directed by Jan Kwiecinski, which focuses on four young adults who look like they stepped out of an Urban Outfitters ad in an empty Polish village in the aftermath of a flood evacuation. This was the wrong segment to end the film with because almost the entirety of the segment consists of the four running around the village and doing childish things (which would probably make more sense if they were teenagers). As eerie as it is to see an empty village, watching four people run through it and act as if they are in the music video for Men Without Hat’s Safety Dance isn’t fascinating at all (though this segment would have been much more entertaining if that was on the soundtrack). There’s some sexual tension between the lone girl, Koko (Justyna Wasilewska) and Pace (Tomasz Tyndyk) and Philip (Pawel Smagala), who both clearly want to use their time in the empty village to get down with Koko. There’s a lot of European-ish imagery here, particularly with the title and the ending scenes, which I assume has some sort of core message about responsibility and youth (hence the title), but that same message could have been made in a short a third of the length and more successfully with younger actors.
Apparently the three filmmakers were asked to explore the fourth dimension in each of their segments, but whatever message they each were trying to convey is lost in a muddle of the pretentiousness of the drawn-out segments. I don’t really know what this film was trying to accomplish as an experiment, but it might have had a chance if several minutes were cut out of each segment and that time was given to a fourth segment (which would better fit its fourth dimension theme, anyway) to fix the obvious pacing issues. In its current form it just doesn’t work.
Rating: Have the guts to make an experimental film doesn’t mean the result will actually be good or succeed (3/10)
Tribeca Film Festival Screening Times
Tuesday, April 24 6:00PM AMC Loews Village 7 – 1
Wednesday, April 25 8:30PM AMC Loews Village 7 – 3
Friday, April 27 3:30PM Clearview Cinemas Chelsea 6
Recent Comments