One Night in One City (2007)

 

Director: Jan Balej

Screenplay: Ivan Arsenyev and Jan Balej

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #178 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

With pieces that are horror, others incredibly dark humoured, and aspects entirely of the unconventional, Jan Balej's stop motion film is in mind to its forbearers like Jan Švankmajer, with even visual and symbolic nods to the older statesman's work. As a film, One Night in One City is a series of vignettes involving human characters, non-human ones and a lovable duo of a fish and a tree man we will get to later, some segments sweet and others incredibly dark.

Like Švankmajer, the truly surreal offers the most humane aspects of ordinary life, the stop motion here absolutely is at its peak. Immediately Balej's style is very distinct of cramped apartments, timeless of an era before when there was modern technology, when this was made in 2007 with the likes of the internet and mobile phones. The human cast are far more stranger than anything else, figures who look distorted, pallid grey skin and peculiar features; the closest to two stereotypical beauties, two twin sisters who a man hires to watch him parade around in skimpies with a phallic taxidermied bird's head on his crown, look like E.T.'s sisters.

Their lives are compelling yet also peculiar, beginning with a man who in his spare time plays with a miniature circus set on his dining table, not wrong in the slightest though he does manipulate dead insects within it rather than figures, angered a live ant inspects the tiny cannon with fascination. Then there is another man who lines up the ant infestation in the apartment on his desk with sugar than snorts them up his nose. It is not dissimilar, though his was about extreme sexual fetishes, to Švankmajer's Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), to the point of that man wearing the bird head on top of his own feeling like an explicit reference to the most iconic scenes of the older film.

It does not feel like it is in the shadow of Švankmajer though, nor the Quay Brothers, with its own distinct nature due to those character designs and his tone. In terms of Balej's ideas, there is no sense of an actual genre barring the tangential one of being animation. Aspects definitely qualify as horror or at least the supernatural. One is of a bad musician who finds a severed ear that turns out to be able to grant artistic craft ([Major Spoilers] which in a great twist is actually Vincent Van Gogh's [Spoilers End]). Another explicitly is about a man entering a cafe where the ghosts of yore occasionally appear is still potent. It is weird that One Night... is tagged under the "horror" genre at all, barring those few justifiably suitable segments, but this sequence in particular is a stand out as an almost tranquil ghost tale entirely about mood.

Much of the production is a scrutinisation of humanity. This sounds pretentious, I know, but like comic strips, animation in its exaggeration can arguably tell more about human beings and their quirks in their sense of the absurd, be it Tales from the Far Side to something like this, one of the best moments perfectly showing this. A married woman, whose husband locks himself away in a room designed to play out his fantasies of being a hunter waiting in the woods, with their pet pug dog in role-play (in costume) as a bear, being wooed by an undertaker for dead pet dogs in his apartment. It is for me one of the stand out segments - funny, incredibly black humoured as that poor dog is put through a mock funeral, casket and even he playing the priest, and without any dialogue as all the film just has its human characters making noises, still possessing whit.

Thankfully, as well, in this film's shorter length, Balej's point as a snapshot of humanity never overindulgences and manages to have many segments in the short running time. His darkest material is contrasted also by the purest of joy. Namely, that one of the best story threads, the longest, is probably one of the best male BBFs you could find depicted in cinema. The only thing to bear in mind is that one of the friends is a fish, with fins and a tail he has to hop about on, and the other being a tree, feeling like a very explicit reference to the Jan Švankmajer film Little Otik (2001), where a childless couple pretended to have a log be their child, inexplicably coming to life but unfortunately also liking the taste of anything that moves. Thankfully, this tree is a gentler one; not much happening baring a snapshot of their lives as friends over the four seasons, where the fish man likes games like cards and the tree man in spring has to wait in the mornings for birds to briefly hatch an egg on his head, but it is beautiful. The fact these characters are anthropomorphic figures than people feels loaded in meaning - before, odd people with odd behaviours, not dismissed but still with foibles, contrasted with a segment you could actually show children of figures who are utterly un-human but having a true friendship. Particularly when one of them can decorate himself in Christmas tree lights or just decides to rock out in front of his window with an imaginary air guitar, the one moment that is an abrupt jump into the modern day, especially as that same scene has the tree man looking on the internet the production of guitars.

The only real exceptions among the human characters are two drunken vagabonds who find a genie able to grant their wishes for one night. Some of their decisions are grotesque - desiring women they get an amusement park ride, riding big tea cups, that goes between real erotic photos and has the exit door a gynaecological area they pass through - but it comes with a matter-of-fact humanity, between this and their immediately wishes being drink to appear in glasses in their hands. Jan Balej as a director unfortunately slowed down to a hault when it came to following One Night in One City. Little from the Fish Shop (2015), an adaptation of The Little Mermaid, was his follow up, which used extensive computer effects too, but tragically when we really need more animation to contrast the mainstream, i.e. the CGI animated ones common in cinema, a figure we can turn to in Balej has been absent. I suspect, even if he was still making animation, stop motion does take a long time to production, something to attest to in how long it took Jan Švankmajer to make feature length films into the modern day, especially with the issues of whether the funding is plentiful or not. That this particular film is obscure in itself is sad as, honestly, it was a surprise in a positive way and deserves more attention.

Abstract Spectrum: Eerie/Joyful/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None