The absurd arises from the clash between human search and the unreasonable silence of the world.
(Albert Camus)
Breath, water, sea. But the air becomes heavier to breathe when one is aware of the end. Bernard wakes up in his loft, surrounded by symmetrical objects, rigid habits, a forced order that cannot keep chaos at bay. A pet sheep, a metaphor for emotional refuge, watches him from one room to another, a mute witness to his carefully cultivated solitude.
Subway. Bernard observes faces like worn-out masks. The noise wraps around him, pushing him into an electronic rhythm that has no harmony, only pulses. Life is a repetitive race, a ritual without purpose. He talks to his father and tells him he’s lying. The father replies that he doesn’t grasp the nuances. After all, truth is a matter of inner acoustics. Bernard wants to know how things really are, but there are no linear answers: only deviations, stutters of meaning.
He watches. He is uneasy. A man who no longer knows if what he feels belongs to him. His partner accuses him of being exhausting, of breathing too loudly. She tells him to stop sighing, to act. But what does it mean to act when every gesture is emptied of necessity? His breath is the struggle to exist.
Footage of animals. Dead birds in Louisiana and Arkansas. The father watches TV expressionlessly. Bernard asks, “Are you happy to have been hit?” The father smiles, with the final irony of the defeated: “Yes, it was a good hit.” Reality is unraveling. Carlos, the father, had been attacked in the street. In the hospital, everything is cold, quick, impersonal. No one takes care of vulnerability; the diagnosis is a dirty sound: brain tumor. Two months. Bernard is sucked into the abyss, death begins to dig inside him. Events don’t unfold, they collapse.
He dreams of singing cetaceans. The images break like waves without purpose. His partner leaves him in the subway. She no longer knows why she once loved him. Perhaps she never loved him. He follows her, like a tired dog, like an echo that won’t fade away.
A meeting with the publisher: “The book must be decided and well-crafted, lively and colorful but with sadness. People can no longer face sadness. Everyone must be happy all the time. I feel, I perceive that they cannot make it. We must help people connect with sadness, slowly, like a wild animal that watches you cautiously for weeks and finally accepts the contact, but then disappears into the dense forest. We must understand how and when this happens. That is our task! The new generation will reduce everything to rubble, everything will crash against a wall. For this reason, we must build bridges, and you will help us create these connections.”
The father reports the assault: 21:37, 7317 steps from home. He recounts everything with obsessive precision. Pain hasn’t made him fragile, but more defined. As if dying made him more real.
Meanwhile, Bernard is covering his books with neutral paper, labeling them carefully, aligning them. The void fills him with order. He tells his father, “You’ve always kept me at a distance.” But he doesn’t know if that distance was prevention or condemnation.
Death also nests in the neighbor. The door next door opens: a paralyzed, obese woman, cared for by a boy who makes her breathe. A mute, deformed dance, to the alien rhythm of Neyleyim by Gökçe Kilinçer. The boy moves around the house like an insect. Reality no longer has boundaries.
The film becomes transparent: illness, dissolution, end, monstrosity. Bernard goes to a Berghain-style club with his father and partner. Dark room. Techno. The place is impersonal, and it is precisely this that gives an illusion of freedom. Bernard dances. Carlos follows him. A night without hierarchies. She kisses another woman. Bernard kisses a giant grasshopper. The threshold has been crossed.
He sends the essay. A truck dumps children’s toys. Bernard picks one up and closes its eyes. The symbol is mute. There is no future. “I am intellectually drained.”
He sleeps next to his father. Then Carlos dies. Bernard kisses him on the lips. There is no room left for metaphor. She leaves him.
A man has hanged himself from a bridge. No one notices.
Bernard opens the window. He wears a drone costume. He jumps. He flies. He breathes. He looks at the city from above, all the way to the sea. The sheep bleats.
Pain, if endured, deforms and changes you. The unexpected rips you out of composure. A surreal, Kafkaesque film that dwells in pain, in sadness, as the publisher said; in reaction to absurdity, in the tragedy of existence, and with the music of Kyan Bayani in ontological incomprehensibility. The unexpected unsettles and frees you, creating a dreamlike and visionary situation where it becomes necessary to lose oneself because losing oneself is a necessary condition.
Between what is thought, what is meant, what is believed to be said, what is said... and what the other understands... there are at least nine possibilities for misunderstanding.
(Bernard Werber)
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