The Invisible Fight

If there’s a heaven for great epigraphs, open the hallowed gates for Rainer Sarnet. He begins his fifth film, The Invisible Fight, with a quote from the Psalms: “Praise him with drum and dance”—and then unfurls a madcap tale of kung fu and metal rock. Drum and dance indeed.

The picture opens gloriously. Three leather-clad rockstar kung fu men fall gracefully from the skies. It is the 1970s and the rockstars are on their way from the clouds to the USSR-China border. Upon arrival, they attack Soviet guards—with kicks, swirls, nunchaku, and rock music. At the end of the ruckus, every guard is dead, except for one. You get the picture: it’s quite enough of an insane event to inspire a change of life.

But Rafael doesn’t become a vigilante seeking the deaths of rockstar kung fu fellas. He falls in love with the coolness of their technique, perhaps because, as he later says, “Everything cool is banned in the Soviet Union.”

And so Sarnet’s ridiculous tale truly begins. His film recalls both the Jackie Chan drunken-kung fu films of the 1970s as well as the hyperkinetic Stephen Chow hit, Kung Fu Hustle. As with the latter film, The Invisible Fight has taken a rascally irreverent route to pay homage to a genre that has always paired physically impressive actions with comedy. But Sarnet’s take is too European, too arthouse-y to attract Chow’s sizable audience. He is much too given to sacrificing coherence for gimmickry. For much of the film’s first half, the main thing is fun and silliness.

The presumed depths possible with Rafael’s quest to find something wholesome (or, well, something distracting) from his night of terror is overwritten with an extreme jokiness comprised of Black Sabbath’s ear-splitting music and over-soundtracked gestures. The upshot is a project that will alienate many viewers. But some will, in the manner of the film’s protagonist, become believers or enthusiasts. Already the film, which premiered at Locarno, has made believers out of the aggregators LevelK.

Back to the plot. Somehow, Rafael finds himself at a monastery where another phase of his life begins. He wants to become a monk. Is the connection between monastic living and kung fu kicking buffoonery? Or is monkish living a salve for trauma? Who knows? Our hero is paired with a monk named Irinei (played with zen and occasional aw-shucks by Kaarel Pogga). The relationship between the men becomes a subplot. Another subplot involves a love interest, Rita, for whom Rafael receives a black eye during one of the film’s early quirky fights.

Running a few minutes under 2 hours, there’s a lot that The Invisible Fight could leave in the editing suite. But this isn’t a film of restraint—not even in terms of themes. Religion, international politics, asceticism, wuxia, feminism all get cameos. The film’s star is never in doubt. As Rafael, Ursel Tilk is game for everything in Sarnet’s screenplay.

His pale face, erratic teeth, and crazed expressions are given pride of place several times on the screen. The man is clearly committed to his role. But it does feel like he has given an award-worthy performance in a film too weird, too silly, too pointless for any awards. But he should be proud of his enthusiastic portrayal of a character whose witlessness he conveys with a single-minded clarity of purpose. Tilk gives himself wholly to the chaos of Sarnet’s mind.

Towards the end of the film, we get a “dance”, which involves the wonderfully crimson-lipped Rita. At that point, Sarnet is simply throwing whatever his remarkably fertile imagination can generate on the wall. But the goal isn’t to see what sticks. Nothing does. The Estonian director seems to only want to hear the squishy-squishy sounds of his ideas hitting a solid surface and then falling to the floor. He seems convinced that for certain viewers that will be enough. Across the many film festivals of Europe, he will be proven right.