We've just graduated from a year of deliberately perplexing drama. The iconoclastic finales of "No Country for Old Men," "There Will Be Blood," "Zodiac," "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," "The Mist," "Sweeney Todd" or even "The Sopranos" scorn the gift-wrapped catharsis that American entertainment once could be counted on to provide. They willingly leave us disturbed.
The English-language Polish film "Summer Love" goes further. This pierogi western disassembles the genre mechanics of the gunslinger movie and makes a Dada collage of its gears and springs. Writer/director Piotr Uklanski, a visual artist turning to film, tosses out all the parts that bore him (plot, character development) while playing games with the horse opera's classic images. He gives us glorious renderings of gunplay, galloping horses and grimy-looking desperadoes, edited together in a fashion that suggests a story is about to break out any minute. Teasingly, it never does.
Instead, bigger-than-life western archetypes -- our old friends the Man With No Name (Karel Roden), the Boozy Sheriff (Boguslaw Linda), the Lusty Barmaid (Katarzyna Figura) and the Wanted Outlaw (Val Kilmer!) -- clash in vignettes that seem to be half-remembered from the works of John Ford and Sergio Leone.
The look of the film is handsome, with widescreen vistas that sometimes could pass for the American Southwest and at other times resemble a chilly northern European limbo. The film is very much an in-joke.
Early on, Roden suffers a scalp wound that causes an exuberant amount of crimson blood to cascade down his face. Later, when bullets pepper a wagon hauling parcels of dry pigments, Linda appears with his face powdered bright blue. A point-of-view shot shows a severed head rolling away like a bowling ball. Roden and Figura have a sex scene in which their intertwined bodies graphically spell out S-E-X.
Such droll moments are stretched rather thin over the film's 94-minute running time, but hearing the actors drawl their 10-gallon dialogue in Pope John Paul accents gives many of the episodes a giddy punch.
Uklanski will be present to introduce his film on Saturday (7:30 p.m.).
Colin Covert • 612-673-7186
