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A dejected, hopeless soul, Jakob (Mark Rylance,
Angels and Insects) walks through the door of a dilapidated mansion and into a shadowy world pitched somewhere between the 19th century and the imagination. It's a school for servants, where Jakob is prepared to sacrifice his individuality for a life of servitude and subservience. "There's but one lesson repeated endlessly," he observes. "None of us will amount to much. Later in life we will be something small and subordinate." Jakob throws himself into his repetitive, meaningless exercises, learning the fine art of humiliation at the hands of his lovely but haunted teacher, Lisa Benjamenta (Alice Krige), who runs the slowly collapsing school with her demanding, lonely brother, Johann (Fassbinder regular Gottfried John). The live-action feature debut of surrealist animators the Brothers Quay,
Institute Benjamenta is a dreamy, self-contained world rich in physical detail (obscure signs, the bric-a-brac and detritus of yesteryear), which cinematographer Nic Knowland captures with a foggy, gauzy black-and-white softness, like a turn-of-the-century film. Full of fantasies and dream sequences and laced with brief snippets of animation, it's a film of strange and wondrous imagery, but an elusive story that loses itself in long, meditative sequences of monotonous action and droning narration. Many will find the deliberate pacing slow going, but this deliriously strange and fragile world lost in its own timelessness offers a mesmerizing dream alternative to traditional narrative cinema.
--Sean Axmaker
The first live-action feature by the animators known as the Brothers Quay ("Street of Crocodiles") is an adaptation of a short novel, "Jakob von Gunten," by the eccentric Swiss modernist Robert Walser. The action-such as it is-takes place in a turn-of-the-century school for servants, run by the creepy Herr Benjamenta (Gottfreid John) and his sister (Alice Krige), who is beautiful, nervous, and remote. Both Benjamentas exhibit a rather unhealthy interest in a new student named Jakob (Mark Rylance), and for a hundred and five minutes the three main characters drift through stark rooms and impossibly long corridors (photographed, in luminous black-and-white, by Nic Knowland) in a bizarre erotic reverie. The presence of flesh-and-blood actors has remarkably little effect on the Quays' unique, densely lyrical image-making. Too little. Individual sequences are brilliantly inventive, but at feature length the filmmakers' rigorous aesthetic-no narrative, no psychology, and virtually no humor-becomes oppressive, and their distinctive vision feels less like a revelatory dream than like a heavy and unshakable stupor. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
