Tuesday, May 13, 2008
"It was like my own problem," says Pärn, "because until a certain year my main interest was to go as far as you can traveling. It seemed to me that this was real life. This man leaves but comes back poor. His friends have stayed, have nice houses, but he has seen the whole world."
While one can see the roots of Pärn's design, color and playful use of symbolism in "Is the Earth Round," it has all the problems of a first film, including a poorly recorded soundtrack and awkward pacing. "At this time I didn't know anything about filmmaking," he says. "When we made sound I had to think how it would be -- if it's OK to make some breaks between sound or if it's a bad mistake. It was like inventing a bicycle."
Following his 1979 children's film, "And Plays Tricks" (his first international success), and "Exercises for an Independent Life," he made "Triangle." Released in 1982, "Triangle" is considered a landmark in Estonian animation for its examination of modern relations between a man and a woman; it fuses the personal and political into a witty observation of contemporary domestic politics.
"Triangle" deals with a twisted love triangle between a married couple (Victor and Julia) and a little man who lives under their stove (Eduard). Victor and Julia lead a static life. She cooks. He reads the paper. Lurking beneath this sterile relationship are Julia's fantasies of being loved and caressed. Victor leaves and, with little Eduard, Julia's hopes of passion and escape emerge. But soon the passion passes and Eduard settles comfortably, paper in hand, into Victor's old chair. When Victor returns, there is a brief joyous moment of reconciliation with Julia, but lust once again turns to sterility and silence. In the meantime, Eduard returns to the stove and his own empty relationship with Veronica, the woman he left behind. Foreshadowing virtually all of Pärn's later films, the characters in "Triangle" are too busy imagining who they are not rather than being who they are.
Pdrn has a simpler explanation: "My wife was in the hospital and I was learning how to cook. There is an old Estonian folk tale about a small man who comes out from under the stove and asks for food and eats everything. I just wanted to make a film about cooking."
His blunt portrait of domestic life in the Soviet Union was far removed from the typical children's films that were being tossed out in both Estonia and Russia, and it was a shock to many who saw it. Igor Kovalyov ("Rugrats: The Movie"), one of the transplanted Ukrainians who brought Pärn's style to Hollywood, saw "Triangle" in a movie theater in Kiev in 1982: "It was playing in front of a live-action feature. I was so amazed that I bought tickets for the next screening just to see 'Triangle' again ... I had never seen anything like this. I was so excited I called all my friends to find out who this Pärn was."
"No one wanted to allow the film onto the Soviet screens," recalls Estonian film critic Jaan Ruus. "It was a controversy among Soviet animators who were used to either drawing like Disney or drawing very exact and precise pictures."
Pärn's "Breakfast on the Grass" (1988) is considered by many to be one of the masterpieces of animation. In examining a few moments in the daily lives of four Estonians, Pärn trenchantly critiques life in the Soviet Union by giving viewers a rare glimpse of the absurdities of Communist society and what people endure on a daily basis just to survive. As with "Triangle," "Breakfast on the Grass" astonished Russian audiences with its frank portrait of modern Soviet life.
"I think the general audience was not prepared for this kind of animation," recalls Pärn. "It is a description of a very concrete society told in a realistic way using a dramatic structure that is closer to a live-action feature. But the story is performed using the tools of animation -- visual gags, metamorphosis and different drawing styles. Usually so-called serious stories are dark, heavy, slow and boring. I try to make my serious film funny, multileveled and ironic. I think this fusing of the serious and comic confused people."
In 1992, the year after Estonia became independent, Pärn completed "Hotel E," a bitter critique of the hypocrisy of both the East and the West. While the East represses art and language, he contends, the West, for all its freedom, lacks art and language and, with that, individuality. Playing with stereotypes, Pärn paints the East as a dark, gray world while filling the West with bright colors and friendly, smiling faces. Beneath this pop-art sugarcoating, he seems to be saying, the West is a culture of sterility and illusion. No one does anything, no ones says anything, yet everything is "just great."
"I had been traveling a lot between East and West," says Pärn. "I was between two systems. This is my own story up to a certain point. This is not a film about two systems, about East and West; for me it is a story about this person." While Estonia's independence afforded Pärn more freedom, it came with a price: "In the Soviet time everything which was not permitted was forbidden. So there were an endless number of restrictions that were political, but just insane. Now all the limits are connected with money. The final result is very often the same as before, sometimes worse."
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