Bart Rittish’s documentary and AD director Oscar Hudson debuts in the Venice Critics’ Week sidebar with this high-concept anti-war satire, a glass-clear absurdist nightmare about realizing that your enemy’s otherness is an illusion. There are some bold and ambitious images here, and some interesting split-screen work. There may be a problem with the balance of style and substance, and perhaps the running time is indulgent, but it’s a powerful piece of work.
Twins Elliott and Luke Tittensor play two soldiers of equal rank in opposing armies, named Pte Warne and Pte Arthur. They represent two fictional Ruritanian oddities who were once at war but who have apparently entered into a tense, unstable peace treaty. Warren wears a brilliant white uniform and, like the rest of his country, has a shaved head, while Arthur has shaggy hair and a looser uniform. These two men have been chosen by their countries to be the sole guards on the border in the middle of a vast and powerless desert. They face the concept every day of cooperating and sharing a station that crosses the border, but suspiciously, performing various patriotic rituals to verify their identities.
Hudson may have been inspired by the elaborate ceremony at the Ratari-Wagah border between India and Pakistan—a military ballet of mutual resentment that has become more acute recently as the question of whose flag is bigger is raised. The peace process means that these two border guards must perform their daily ceremonies when no one else is there to witness them, their commanders and civilians many miles away. They are supplied with food and a large supply of live pigeons, a few of which are released each day to symbolize peace.
But when Arthur assumes responsibility for releasing the daily batch of pigeons—they should be doing it together—and also has to contend with the boiled eggs that Warne is cooking for his dinner, their relationship becomes strained. They are in an existential confrontation in the scorching sun, they lose their bearings and their sense of which side of the border they are on, and they are also traumatized by the appearance of the indigenous shepherds (played by Neil Maskell). He appears like the hapless Pozzo in Beckett’s Godot, and the outcome of this encounter causes them to split apart. Which one is which? After all, they have a lot in common: above all, the overbearing figure of a military father whose memory haunts each man.
This is a bustling, lively picture: I can imagine Richard Lester directing it in 1968. Hudson will surely have more to show us.
