Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I don’t think anyone would have expected Esperanto to turn up in a selection of non-English films, but this was part of the inspiration for the theme. Well, to be more specific, I wanted to try an Esperanto film but I didn’t want it to be Incubus because the bad pronunciation is infamous. However, there are only four films known to be produced in Esperanto and this is the only one I was actually able to get my hands on. I guess this has lived pretty well off of getting William Shatner immediately before his big break. Though apparently it was thought lost until the 90s, and a good quality version was only just announced last year.

After watching the movie:

Near the village of Nomen Tuum, there is a well that provides water that heals the sick and makes the ugly beautiful. So famous is this effect that many vain or corrupt people come to seek the well to make them beautiful, and the God of Darkness has appointed his succubi to lure these to their deaths and claim their stained souls. Kia, a younger succubus, complains that her skills of temptation are wasted on such easy prey, but older Amael warns her that tempting a pure soul opens her to the danger of love. Eventually she finds Marc, a soldier who has come to live with his sister to recover from the physical and mental wounds of war. Pretending to be a lost traveler, Kia insinuates herself into their home and convinces Marc to come to the sea with her, planning to drown him like the others. However, while they quickly become infatuated with each other, Marc refuses to get too close to Kia without getting married. When Kia falls asleep lying in a field with him, Marc carries her to the village cathedral. In the cathedral, Kia wakes and is repulsed by the Christian symbols and Marc’s pure love, fleeing to Amael. Amael tells her that they must take revenge on Marc for defiling her with love, and summon the Incubus. They can’t just Kill Marc, as his soul is too clean for the God of Darkness, but they can hurt him through Arndis and try to make him stain his soul.

I suppose I should have expected religious trappings in a movie about demons of seduction, but I didn’t expect a morality play. I felt like Marc’s perfection was laid on too strong until I realized that this is a morality play and Marc is not the protagonist. This isn’t Marc’s story of being tested, it’s the story of Kia’s own test. Meanwhile poor Arndis’s single solitary function in the story is to suffer. I’m not really sure how her getting blinded by an eclipse while Marc is romping with Kia has any effect on the plot, since by the time he returns that night, the low light of the evening allows her to see again, but almost as soon as she’s done groping in the forest, she’s the subject of Marc’s version of the trials of Job.

The dialogue is incredibly stilted, not just in the manner of a story more focused on its lofty ideas than on the plot and the emotions, but also in the manner of actors who barely understand what they’re saying trying to get the syllables right (which they reportedly did not). There are conflicting reports as to whether the purpose of filming in Esperanto was for artistic reasons or because it was expected to give it a wider release range. The latter seems unfathomable to me. Yes, Esperanto is meant to be easy for speakers of Western European languages to learn and understand, but it’s still a language that practically nobody understands on the level needed to follow film dialogue (in 2011, there were about 1,000 native speakers and 30k-2m speaking as a second language, compared to 7b total population), so while there may have been a thought that it would be familiar in every country, it’s really just a foreign language in every country. I have a very broad vocabulary base in multiple languages and I would have been lost without the subtitles more often than not.

If this movie was not presented in a constructed language, nobody would care about it. Probably even with the William Shatner bump. For a supernatural horror, there is almost nothing supernatural and only a mild dread. Even by the standards of the B-movies I’ve been known to enjoy, this has low production values on screen. It flirts with titillation but it doesn’t so much imply as insinuate an implication. This is a movie in which very little happens until it’s already happened. This is one of the few movies I can say I don’t recommend not because it’s objectionable, but because aside from the linguistic uniqueness, it’s just bland.