A true story shot like a surreal fairy tale, Better Go Mad in the Wild is a boisterous, bittersweet, playfully mischievous film about two deeply eccentric twin brothers who share a fractious off-grid existence in a remote Middle European forest landscape. Loosely adapted from a non-fiction book of the same name by journalist Aleš Palán, Czech writer-director Miro Remo’s latest lyrical, lightly fictionalised documentary makes its Dutch debut at IDFA this week following its world premiere at Karlovy Vary film festival, where it won the top prize, the Golden Globe.
Shot in sporadic bursts over five years, Better Go Mad in the Wild delivers a richly layered portrait of Frantisek and Ondrej Klisik, two balding, bearded, hermits who share a crumbling farmhouse in Sumava, a mountainous region close to the Czech-German border. Both are around 60, though they look much older, partly due to lives marked by hardship, poverty and boozy excess. Frantisek is also missing an arm following a sawmill accident. Ondrej drinks and smokes, howls at the moon, and sings heartbreak ballads to a captive audience of chickens. Between reminiscing about lost love, youthful folly and the women whose hearts they once broke, the brothers fight, fall out and reconcile on a daily basis.
Despite his disability, Frantisek is the more optimistic dreamer of the two, working on ambitious side projects, including the construction of a “perpetuum mobile” flying machine. “I’m an artist and I want to say something important to the world,” he insists. Ondrej is a more fatalistic, railing against “boring cunts” Putin and Hitler, and routinely dismissing life as futile. When his brother berates him over his drunken binges, it only leads to more arguments and even physical fights. “Every time to tell me to quit, I want to drink more,” he growls. Later, in more conciliatory mood, he says “sorry that I will die first… bring a flower to my grave.”
Though this is ostensibly a non-fiction film, Remo fills Better Go Mad in the Wild with semi-staged vignettes and striking visual tableaux: a burning snowman, a symbolic dividing wall between the brothers, a giant circular mirror that becomes a recurring motif. But the director’s most whimsical stylistic device is putting snippets of voice-over narration into the mouth of the duo’s pet bull, Nandy. This is an audacious twist but it works, reinforcing the sense that the brothers inhabit their own phantasmagorical realm slightly unmoored from conventional reality. We are definitely not in Kansas any more, Toto.
Couching this story in poetry and music, including ironically triumphant passages from the symphonic piece “Vltava” by local Czech composer Bedrich Smetana, Remo frames his protagonists more like semi-mythical outsider artists than bickering backwoods misfits. Stronger on visual brio than explanatory hinterland, Better Go Mad in the Wild skips between years and seasons with few clear markers, giving us almost zero background detail on the brothers. At one point it emerges that both were decorated for their resistance to Czechoslovakia’s former Communist regime, a fleeting mention that demands much more context. An unexpected death, announced late in the film, brings a poignant sense of closure but again feels under-explained. However, for all its minor omissions and oversights, this is still a boldly original, emotionally charged, and life-affirming experiment in stranger-than-fiction documentary cinema.
Director, producer: Miro Remo
Screenwriters: Miro Remo, Aleš Palán, based on the book by Palán
Cinematography: Dušan Husár, Miro Remo
Editing: Šimon Hájek, Maté Csuport
Music: Adam Matej
Production company: Arsy-Versy (Czech)
World sales: Filmotor, Prague
Venue: IDFA (Best of Fests)
83 minutes
In Czech, Slovak
