JFL

The essence of eighties yuppie assholery, embodied by the two main characters, unfortunately plays the lead role here and overshadows not only the central McGuffin, but also the wonderfully slapstick acting of the always excellent Don Calfa.

This cynically cruel update of John Ford’s classic western The Searchers exposes viewers to a nihilistic world in which the only certainty is death, so the only people who will not become helpless victims are those who are devoted to it and seek it out. The final driving force of the apocalyptically degraded society remains the cycle of violence taken to such an extreme that the people resort to absurdity and monstrousness of Boschian proportions, though spatially spread out over bleak steppes, but paradoxically all the more concentrated in the details. No, this isn’t a Tarantino or Mad Max movie, because there isn’t anything cool or exaggerated here; it’s just desperately cynical, hopeless, grotesquely deviant and depressing. The violence isn’t given any aesthetic value, as it comes terrifyingly suddenly and laconically, going beyond the concepts of misogyny to a dimension of pure ruthlessness towards everyone and always bears down on both the victims and the perpetrators, even though the latter are not aware of it at any given moment. Despite all of that, however, Steppenwolf is a tremendously captivating work. Brutal instinctiveness meets iconographic symbolism in the refined shots, which combine the spectacular standard of modern western genre movies with the aesthetic tradition of the intellectual cinema of the former Eastern Bloc. Despite the details, this is not a midnight romp for an intoxicated audience, but a dramatic vision that cheap trash flicks and calculated exploitation movies can’t hold a candle to.

A subject for a short stretched out to a brief feature-length film (so far, so good) that is appealing primarily because of its cinematography and the great performance of the main child actress. She is the centrepiece of the film, which focuses on the child over the course of a single day, when all of the adults are dealing with a crisis situation and mostly ignore the girl or see her as a burden. Fortunately, this is something different from the promotional slogan promising to show the situation from a child’s perspective – that’s not what actually happens here (which isn’t a bad thing; again: so far, so good). Viewer’s see the girl’s reactions, but they do not perceive the situation from her perspective; on the contrary, they project their impressions onto her. After all, the film’s adult perspective reveals the occasional shift away from the child to views of the adults in crucial confrontational moments (which is a different concept than would suggest itself, but again: so far, so good). However, this framework is disrupted by the pseudo-vintage cutaways, which do not in any way lend depth to the work. In the better case, they don’t have any storytelling value; in the worse case, they are too telling, as they reveal the hollowness of the film’s concept and its superficiality. Unfortunately the sum of all of these aspects is neither a fragile look into the child’s soul nor a tenacious art-house film with a strict concept (though Tiny Lights comes close to both of these forms). Rather, it is merely a precisely crafted and nicely intelligent midcult film. On the other hand, if it had been different in any way, it’s perhaps unlikely that Prima would have put any money into it. ____ PS: If one wanted to make a joke, it could be said that Tiny Lights is Son of Saul from the world of children or a live-action Cow and Chicken from the Czech suburbs. However, both comparisons are completely inappropriate, because Tiny Lights doesn’t have such a consistently filled-out concept as the former, and it lacks the wildness and unrestrained creativity of the latter. But due to its true essence, it was never supposed to have any of those attributes.