Visually ravishing enough to excuse its more jarringly pretentious excesses, Luka marks a kind of homecoming for Belgian-American writer-director Jessica Woodworth and her regular collaborator Peter Brosens, credited as producer here. The duo are film festival stalwarts best known internationally for their mockumentary comedies King of the Belgians (2016) and The Barefoot Emperor (2019), but they originally specialised in sombre, arty travelogue dramas. Shot in luminous monochome tones on Sicily, this eye-catching literary adaptation is very much in the serious camp.
Staged and choreographed like an avant-garde theatre production in places, Luka aspires to the lofty cerebral heights of old-school art-house heavyweights like Bergman, Tarkovksy and Bela Tarr. Inevitably it falls short, too often mistaking ponderous, humourless solemnity for intellectual depth. That said, this is still an absorbingly beautiful, admirably high-minded work with solid festival credential and niche theatrical potential following its Rotterdam world premiere this week.
Woodworth freely adapts Luka from Dino Buzzati’s 1939 novel The Tartar Steppe, a Kafka-esque fable about an Italian soldier at a frontier fortress who initially yearns for a “hero’s death”, before the years begin to fall away and the futility of his existence becomes painfully clear. Resonating across the ages, Buzzati’s book has both literary and cinematic pedigree, having previously spawned a 1976 film adaptation starring Max Von Sydow. It was also a key inspiration for J.M. Coetzee’s prize-winning 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians, which was adapted into a well-reviewed 2019 film starring Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp.
Purposely vague about its retro-futuristic dystopian era and setting, the story opens with idealistic young soldier Luka (Jonas Smulders) arriving at a Fort Kairos, a vast crumbling concrete outpost guarding the northern edge of an unnamed empire. Glumly intoning a farewell letter to his mother in voice-over, he proudly boasts he is “born for battle” and may never never see his family again. But his chances of combat glory soon prove to be vanishingly slim. Led by the sternly nameless General (Geraldine Chaplin) and her hawkish sidekick Sergeant Major Raf (Jan Bijvoet), Luka’s military superiors insist an unseen enemy simply named “The North” is forever poised to attack. And yet the parched mountain landscape beyond the fortress appears alien, elemental and lifeless.
Initially denied his ambition of becoming a sniper, Luka is assigned a lowly maintenance job. Rigid order and strict hierarchy are the only laws in Fort Kairos. “Rules keep us civilised,” Raf insists. “Regulations regulate, without them we will cease to exist.” Daily life in the fort seems to consist mostly of stylised ritual, testosterone-fuelled wrestling contests, musical chants and incantations that look more like contemporary dance pieces than military drills. Punishment for breaking the rules means being “ghosted”, painted white and shunned as a non-person.
As he slowly rises through the ranks, Luka comes to realise that “The North” is a phantom menace, a paranoid fabrication designed to give these absurd totalitarian war games some illusory sense of purpose. He also forms a warm, faintly homoerotic bond with fellow young recruits Konstantin (Samvel Tadevossian) and Geronimo (Django Schrevens), who share his growing disillusionment with their meaningless mission. Eventually this trio try to disrupt the General’s fascistic ethos of blind obedience and self-sacrifice, with tragic but ultimately cathartic results.
Blessed with the chisel-cheeked androgynous beauty of a silent-era matinee idol, the aptly named Smulders is well suited to the high-resolution fashion-shoot look of Luka. Indeed, the high-calibre work of hotshot rising-star cinematographer Virginie Surdej (The Blue Caftan, Casablanca Beats) is one of the film’s key selling points. Surdej brings painterly composition, architectural symmetry and chiaroscuro shading to the rugged splendour of the Mount Vesuvius backdrop and the monumental battlements of the half-finished concrete dam which serves as the main fort location.
Still iconic at 78, Chaplin also invests her fairly thankless villain role with poise and humanity, maintaining an admirably straight face even when Woodworth obliges her to perform risibly silly symbolic gestures, like playing a cluster of iron nails with a violin bow. Luka is full of such achingly pretentious, unintentionally funny moments. But taken as a non-naturalistic, visually exquisite viewing experience with admirably high intentions, there is much to savour here.
Director, screenwriter: Jessica Woodworth
Cast: Jonas Smulders, Geraldine Chaplin, Samvel Tadevossian, Jan Bijvoet, Sam Louwyck, Django Schrevens, Hal Yamanouch
Cinematography: Virginie Surdej
Editing: David Verdurme
Production design: Sabina Christova
Music: Teho Teardo
Producers: Peter Brosens, Maarten D’Hollander, Tim Martens, Diana Elbaum, Flaminio Zadra, Pilar Saavedra Perrotta, Denis Vaslin, Fleur Knopperts, Stefan Kitanov, Mira Staleva, Anzhela Frangyan
Production Companies: Bo Films (Belgium), Krater Films (Belgium), Beluga Tree (Belgium), Palosanto Films (Italian), Volya Films (Netherlands), Art Fest (Bulgaria), Dokino (Armenia)
World sales: Films Boutique
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Big Screen Competition)
In English
94 minutes
