Foreboding - The Divine Human
Thoughts On: Foreboding (Şi Va Fi... 1992)
Made by Valeriu Jereghi, this is the Moldovan film of the Series
Almost surprisingly so, Foreboding (Şi Va Fi) is a film I thoroughly enjoyed. It opens in a wasteland in which we experience no story or hope, and yet it slowly develops a narrative of survival culminated by a very sporadic and surreal image of crystal photogénie. The last shot is of a woman, young boy and cow in a stone home in the forest; and with the apocalyptic montage that precedes it we find it ethereal. The magic and profundity of this film is its poetic imagination of the re-emergence of humanity. It is done symbolically with our main character, a female who initially appears inhuman and ghost-like. She transforms into a divine figure, becoming herself a mother escaping the symbolic, and possibly literal, rape of man's machined evil, discovering after life itself.
Though this film was selected for the Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 1993, there is little material I could find on it that recognises this film in as high a regard as I think it should be. The highest praise I can give Foreboding is to align it with the likes of Come and See Me, Ivan's Childhood and Stalker. These are behemoth films in the dismal corner of Post-Soviet and Eastern European apocalyptic cinema that present poetry like Eisenstein and Vertov before them expressed movement. Director Jereghi approaches Tarkovsky and Klimov with his search for divine humanity, pushing not only to dredge us through mud and misery toward life, but does so in an oneirogenic way. There are shots in Foreboding you just have to see to understand this: the young boy pissing in the fire; the cow shitting; the woman being pulled up out of the crack by her cow; the pumpkin on the lake. All of these shots and the sequences - which I can't delve into detail on as they are so strange - around them lace this film with a mystic and carnal symbology that allows the emergence of photogénie in the final shot. That is to say that the humanity of this film, both cinematically and narratively, is found in the collision of strange inspirations - some dark, some bright. We see this with the characters, who wander with no direction but find a story to establish; with the land itself, initially empty and barren, but eventually capable of producing life. But the primary element that we are drawn to by Foreboding is a spontaneous metaphysical synchronicity. The symbolic divinity of humanity (that is, its capacity for an ascension towards a higher self) is depicted as something like a dream with no cause or logical meaning. Nonetheless, it is this that allows Foreboding to conclude with a poetic photogénic projection of the post-apocalyptic. This is then a film about the survival of the human spirit and soul, not simply a character or humanity as social entity.
Foreboding is currently available on YouTube in questionable quality.
