Estonian director Veiko Õunpuu found inspiration from Hieronymous Bosch for his Tiger competitor The Temptation Of St. Tony, reports Geoffrey Macnab
Veiko is busy with final rehearsals of a new stage adaptation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play The Garbage, The City and Death and so won’t make it to Rotterdam until the end of the week.
By that time, some Rotterdam audiences will already have seen the astonishing opening sequence of The Temptation Of St. Tony in which we see a car drive through a funeral cortege, crash spectacularly and spin upside down into the sea.
No, the director says, the scene wasn’t easy to shoot. The first time he attempted it, the effect wasn’t spectacular enough. “I suggested to the stuntman, who is a bit crazy, that it was too meek. He got offended. The second time, he overdid it. For a while, I was really afraid he was dead. What we had agreed was that he would instantly tell me over the walkie-talkie that he was alright. But I didn’t hear anything because his walkie-talkie had fallen off into the water. I was terrified that something was really wrong.”
Speaking by phone, Õunpuu explained his decision to quote Dante’s Divine Comedy (“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark”) at the start of the film. “I thought I needed to give one possible key to interpret the following events,” the writer-director suggests. The film, shot in black and white, is a surrealistic black comedy about the travails of a middle-aged man, adrift in the Estonian countryside and trying to cope as his life unravels around him.
It has been suggested that The Temptation Of St. Tony is an allegory of the new "wolf-like" capitalism in Eastern Europe: an interpretation the director firmly rejects.
Ask him about his dark and surrealistic storytelling style and he says, “the Estonians have lived through a lot at the end of the 20th century. This sense of absurd, maybe Beckett-like feeling is there. Maybe the sardonic humour is a bit Estonian – it’s about the disintegration of a soul.”
The first point of inspiration for Õunpuu was the celebrated painting of The Temptation Of St. Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch. The filmmaker studied painting himself and says he has always warmed to both the apocalyptic side of Bosch and his “fierce commentary on society… he’s almost like a mad, raving prophet.”
As for the decision to shoot in black and white, he attributes that to Bela Tarr. The Hungarian auteur once remarked that he shot in black and white to make sure audiences realized they were watching a film, not looking out of the window. “I wanted to make the point that people should be aware every moment that it is a film, a work of art.”
Õunpuu is shortly to start work on a new screenplay with the very engaging title Free Range Fred. He describes it as “an anti-Western road movie” about “what it means to be free.” In the meantime, he is busy working on the Fassbinder play. Õunpuu is a great admirer of the German writer-director. “He made 40 films. Half of them are good and some are just exceptional. I’ve always admired these artists who’ve managed to die young.” Is this an aspiration of his own? “Not really, but I admire artists who manage to live without any concern for their well-being.”
More about The Temptation of St. Tony here.