A Latvian omnibus unified by four new directors. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

COMPILATION films don’t often gel together as one feature. For the most part, directors approach their part with a singular vision, and when mashed-up with the other parts, an uneven tone and narrative usually results. Vogelfrei, a portmanteau film made by four young Latvian directors, demonstrates that a unified approach and a carefully plotted narrative progression can allow a multi-directed project to really work structurally and thematically. The film succeeds in allowing each director their own voice too, no small feat, and in the process, demonstrates that there is some very promising talent coming out of Latvia.

Vogelfrei centres on one character, Teodors, at different stages of his life – childhood, adolescence, adulthood and ‘advanced adulthood’ (I’d be wary of calling the final Teodors elderly). The film plays with dichotomies – rural/urban (the first and last scenes are pastoral, while the middle two scenes are coldly alienating in its cityscapes), young/old (the children play as adults, the adults play as children) and loneliness/ human communication. The middle two scenes especially play up the alienation, and Teodors’ lack of contact with other people – the two Teodors are impassive, complicit victims in their own loneliness. It is only in the end of the third scene where redemption appears. However the final scene is the standout – a stunning piece of filmmaking by Anna Viduleja that brings the whole narrative together. The reactive, unconfident Teodors is replaced by a more worldly, accepting Teodors, as he leads two smug businessmen into a swamp. The final clip contrasts freedom and entrapment (its mise-en-scène is quite stunning), suggesting Teodors’ worldview isn’t as constricted as it once was. Of course, the power of the final scene derives from its juxtaposition with the previous scenes, however, director Viduleja beautifully evokes both visually and tonally the more emotionally liberated Teodors.

The four segments eschew an approach which adds in period detail. In other words, his childhood didn’t take place say, sixty years ago (e.g. during the World War Two etc.), and the film feels like it could have been four different characters on a single day in contemporary times (though the film is set in four different seasons, summer to spring). There’s an odd sense of temporality as a result – less a sense of Teodors getting older and wiser as time passes (or having the film falling into the trap of being a ‘bio-pic’), and more like four different people, whom the audience interprets in relation to what has gone on previously. Vogelfrei is beautiful filmmaking, each story told with a compelling visual and narrative sense, and ultimately achieves that rare thing: a multi-directed film coalescing together well.