Review by Keri O’Shea
When editor Ben asked if there were any takers to review a Bulgarian neo-noir entitled Zift, I’ll admit it – I jumped at the chance. My knowledge of Bulgaria is limited, but I find Eastern Europe fascinating and the cinema I have seen from that part of the world doubly so, so I was looking forward to a familiar-yet-different crime thriller. The blurb which accompanied the screener seemed to promise as much; nefarious deeds, a jewel theft and hard jail time all gave me the impression of a slick, vigorous drama to come.
Well, whatever I was expecting, Zift was immensely different to that. In its favour, this was not one of those films I could just sit straight down after viewing and review – but if I was going to try to sum it up at all, I’d say it was David Lynch does The Shawshank Redemption. Yep, that’s what I said. This is a quiet but effective film which meanders along a strange path peopled with grotesques, using the premise of a crime largely in order to look at what happens to a man who has spun off his axis, and what causes him to do so in the first place. As such, and due to its visual style too, this movie is as much art house as thriller, but it splices together elements from several genres.
Based on the novel by Vladislav Todorov (who also scripted the film), Zift – using an ambitious time structure which spans twenty years between the 1940s and 60s – introduces us to ‘Moth’ (Zahari Baharov), a man about to be released from the austere confines of the prison where he has been incarcerated, wrongly, for murder. I was immediately intrigued by such an intimidating figure, covered in jailhouse tattoos and ostensibly supportive of the then-new Communist regime in Bulgaria yet with a copy of Voltaire’s Candide and a foreign dictionary. Whatever Moth’s ambitions, they seem to be to get the hell away from the Socialist utopia he espouses. As he prepares for new life on the outside, we find out more about his twenty year old story: his love for Ada, or ‘Mantis’, and his subsequent involvement with an attempted diamond theft with accomplices Mantis and the charmingly-nicknamed ‘Slug’, an underworld character with connections. Moth took the rap to protect Ada, but his ordeal is not over yet. Slug has risen through the ranks of the new regime, and believes that Moth knows the whereabouts of the (still missing) diamond: he has the clout to test his former accomplice on that score. Slug is a powerful man. Moth has nothing but the clothes he stands up in and a lump of chewing bitumen (the ‘zift’ of the title).
The interceding twenty years have just frozen a tragic course of events, and Moth’s freedom sets them in motion again. He still loves Ada, but wants only to see the grave of their young son (born while he was in prison) before he leaves forever. Perhaps it’s not as easy as that, though. Perhaps nothing is. Dazzled and perturbed by the new appearance of Sofia, where he grew up, Moth wanders from place to place, beset on all sides by nonsense anecdotes from groups of people who seem anything but his ‘comrades’ and by a feeling that nothing is as it seems.
There is a satisfying thread of culture shock running throughout this film, and a strong sense of place, from the Cyrillic text on the prison walls declaring, ‘No Work, No Food’ to the eating of ‘white jam’ in the first anecdote we hear, through to the names of new structures and the notion of chewing bitumen in the first place. Culture shock is not enough to sustain an entire film, of course, so how does the rest of the narrative here match up? Well, at first it was difficult to grasp the tone of the film; this is at least partially because I was expecting something other than what I actually got. The time structure moves backwards and forwards, going from severity to black humour, sometimes seeming pure noir and sometimes close to farce. After a while, though, I settled into the mode: Moth is detached from things going on around him, and by having him as the key character, we are made to be just like him. The use of a voiceover to give insight into his mental processes adds some clarity, but then Moth spends as much time noticing scents as he does rationalising his condition or understanding what to do next. He’s lost, and we’re lost too.
This is far from a pleasant trip, either. Shot completely in black and white, the noir stylings are done well, but even more than noir the pervading atmosphere of gloom, corruption, perverse hidden agendas and subterfuge does not make for an easy watch. The dark humour here does nothing to lighten this, either; you’ll notice one common theme throughout. That theme is, literally, shit. You can’t get too lofty when you’re made to listen to shit-themed stories all the way through the film. The term ‘zift’ itself is also slang for shit; perhaps you can make something simple or complex out of that and not be wrong. Whatever – as remote and addled as Moth often is, you do end up feeling for him, and even though the one ‘variable’ responsible for what happens to him is rendered a little too simply for my liking, the end sequences of this film are immensely gratifying.
This is not a movie for everyone. If you are anticipating anything ‘high octane’ from this, forget it. If you are looking for a Hollywood-style movie underlining of all the key themes, forget that as well. This is a quietly bizarre film, a mood piece, with a backdrop of politics which Westerners only know from the outside and a range of deeper significances which are handled obliquely. Zift is understated, then, but ambitious and absorbing, and certainly gave me pause for thought. That in itself makes me want to recommend it – but I do so with caution.
Isis/Euerka Entertainment release Zift to Region 2 DVD on 20th February 2012.