Description: Following a ‘major incident’ practice at a dilapidated Hungarian hospital, one of the volunteers remains behind - a drug addict called Johanna (Tóth), who runs amok searching for morphine until she falls down a flight of stairs and ends up unconscious. Awaking with no memory of her past life, she is effectively ‘born again’, and trained by one of the doctors (Trill) to become a nurse. However, she develops her own rather unorthodox methods to treat her patients - what Marvin Gaye once called Sexual Healing, and when she is found out she finds herself in danger from both her colleagues and her charges.
The film's dialogue is entirely sung, with the actors voiced by singers, to a new score by Zsofia Taller of rather variable quality. The melody is often eschewed in favour of what sounds like random notes, until occasionally, a passage of unexpected beauty emerges, like the series of arpeggios played when Johanna is in the CT scanner. It's difficult to be sure how well the libretto has survived its translation. Some lines sound distinctly awkward in English, like the closing repetition of "Infinite goodness was her failure". Nonetheless, much of it is mournfully beautiful, and it is a pleasure to hear lines like "Let's run to Urology!" sung by a massive chorus.
Aesthetically, the film is rather more consistent. Grainy and grimy, Johanna appears to have been shot mostly handheld, and has the look of a found relic from the 1970s. A unique system of moving lights has been used so that the camera sweeps round in darkness, illuminating only whatever is directly in front of it. It’s as if long passages of the film were made using torchlight. The resulting chiaroscuro effect lends scenes a supernatural aura, heightening the otherworldliness of the story. At times, the use of powerful side lighting and pitch-black backgrounds is reminiscent of Vermeer - surely a deliberate homage, underlined by Tóth’s nurse's headgear and translucent beauty.
Determining what the film is actually about is another matter, though. Joan of Arc's story has been retold so many times that one must ask why is it relevant now? Johanna's journey - from tragic teenager to an object of use and abuse by all those around her - seems to reflect not so much the career of the Maid of Orleans as the trafficking of Eastern European women by the modern sex trade. The film takes place in a world where women are exclusively lust objects or jealous harpies and men are grasping manipulators, and it offers a distinctly downbeat and repulsive view of the 21st century.
Whether that makes for an entertaining or enlightening 83 minutes is another matter. But director Mundruczó has certainly created an ambitious and emotive new opera, using images that linger in the mind long after the curtain falls.
http://rapidshare.com/files/249049765/j_km.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/249068685/j_km.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/249084341/j_km.part3.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/249110550/j_km.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/249126191/j_km.part6.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/249149474/j_km.part8.rar
eng srt included
no pass
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