Süd. Grenze

"The movie is as poetic, personal, mesmerizing and free-flowing as the above quote. At the same time, it's visually stunning, with beautiful cinematography and uneven rhythm. The experimental formalism somehow blends into a compelling and coherent whole where nothing stands out as artificial or far-fetched. The lyrical sadness of the first half smoothly transposes into a madhouse performance of the second, with a dance of vampish looking women that is somehow reminiscent of some scenes in Rivette's Duelle. A sad superhero with a false nose, Gaucho is a bohemian trouble maker admired by the populace and loathed by the authorities. After a metaphorical fall to his death, he is met by a midget with no face, who is to accompany Gaucho on his ultramundane journey. This is one of the most satisfying little surprises that came my way in the past few months; I'm quite happy to finally present it here even though that forces me to write some sort of rudimentary review as no shrink-wrapped verbiage seems to be available anywhere. I first bumped into a rip of this film on a friend's ftp site; it was an awful quality TV capture in .wmv format; I scanned through it and realized that I both going to love this film and must get it on DVD if at all possible. That turned out to be quite a chore as it only seems to be available from exactly one russian shop that ships only within Russia and only COD. When I finally got it, I was not disappointed. Anton Adasinsky started out as a performer in Vyacheslav Polunin's famous mime troupe and became notorious dancing naked while playing trombone in the streets of Saint-Petersburg in the 80s, accompanied by a group of friends with saxophones. Adasinky himself called his street performances a form of russian butoh. At the age of 29 he picked up dancing and soon founded his theater company, DEREVO. After spending some time in Saint Petersburg, Prague, Florence and Amsterdam, Adasinsky settled in Dresden, where the city government gave his troupe 1500 sq.m. of space in an old factory. He since toured around the world with universal acclaim; his "La Divina Commedia" got Total Theatre Award for Outstanding excellence and Innovation at the Edinburg Fringe Festival.