"I want to die, but shhh... right now I want to sleep."
Have you seen Aaltra? I did. That's why I started to search everywhere Avida, another crazy movie by Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine. It took a while, but finally I found it. And almost all my efforts paid off.
According to the "story" let me quote the laconic description from the imdb: "The kidnapping of a plump billionaire's dog [it's name is Avida] by a deaf-mute and two ketamine addicts goes wrong." The crazy story tells really about this, but unlike the Aaltra, here the story becomes secondary next to the crazyness. There are similarities too, like a "song-scene": an unbelievable Finnish karaoke-version of a well known song "Sunny" this time turns into an offbeat cacophonic synthetizer-performance. I wouldn't say that this one isn't as funny as Sunny:), but I suppose that the difference between the two songs depicts perfectly the difference between the two films. While the Aaltra's jokes never forget that they are part of a story (two crippled neighbours travelling with their wheelchairs from Belgium to Finland to claim for compensation from a tractor company Aaltra..), Avida is funny as hell too, but the jokes are embedded into a Buñuel-, Dali-, and Jodorowsky-like surrealistic, non-narrative dimension.
Apropos the jokes: You might find them rather disturbing - at least morally objectionable - but they are working unbelievable well (I really rarely burst into laughter during watching a movie, but what else you can do when you see those retards shooting each other with a narcotic ketamine-arrows used for elephants?). Somehow they are very "filmic": most of the time they are using very deliberately the tools of a film language, like playing with the frame, with the deep layers of the shot, with the (dis)orientational possibilities of the establishing shot, and so on. It looks like an amateur, low-budget experimental film, but the truth is that Avida is a well built professional job.
Have you seen playing petanque with plastic chairs? I don't think so. If you're interested in it, this is your movie. Aaltra was better for me (without knowing that this could have 9/10 easily), but if you would like to see a mixture of von Triers Idioterne and a bootleg by Jodorowsky and Buñuel, then you might feel lucky yourself to have these crazy guys (not only the director-duo, but in different roles such names like Claude Chabrol, Mathieu Kassovitz, Kati Outinen, etc.) who deliver such a fun.
WATCH the scene of the dog's kidnapping:)
8/10
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