Maska

Maska is a macabre short film directed by the Quay Brothers, eccentric movie-makers born in the United States but living in London.  The movie was made in 2010 and, apparently, financed through Polish arts agencies.  Accordingly, the film's spare dialogue and narration is presented in Polish.  The movie has an imposing, if dissonant, musical accompaniment by Krzysztof Penderecki (De Sonori Naturis).  The film is allegedly based on a short story by the famous Soviet science fiction writer Stanislaus Lem -- however, the Quay bros. adapt freely from their ostensible sources and its not clear to me how closely related the movie is to the writing on which it is based.

Maska concerns a rather scuffed doll with a ceramic face and weirdly pointed breasts that look a bit like the shells of snails, all mottled in tones of brown and dirty white.  This figure, called Duenna, is first shown lying supine on what seems like an operating table.  Several male creatures are spying on the half-naked Duenna from what seems to be some sort of cell shrouded behind a semi-permeable membrane.  (Much of the footage seems shot through smears of vaseline or dense swaths of parchment-colored fabric. In other scenes, the effigies seems submerged in murky water.  The images are dark and hard to decipher, although always interesting in a horrible sort of way.)  The two male figures are tiny bald mannequins with abraded faces and skulls, bulging blue eyes, and tiny, ineffectual limbs.  Duenna feels herself flooded "with gender" and arises from the table where she has been reposing like the Bride of Frankenstein.  She struts about a little, tall and imperious, with her nose partially knocked off -- clearly, a doll that has seen better times.  Then, she falls backward while the music howls and thuds and either gives birth (or splits apart like a chrysalis), revealing from her entrails a sinister and aggressive insect.  The creature is a chimera -- part praying mantis, part scorpion, and part spider: the critter has long cantilevered legs and glistening pedipalps.  The bug ends up at the bottom of a funnel-shaped indentation, a nasty place where it is gloomy and wet-looking.  Duenna had been dancing gravely with one of the guys with the red, raw scuffed faces.  This poor bastard slides down into the funnel where the bug promptly eats him.  Duenna ends up on the operating table again, motionless, and it seems like the cycle is about to begin again.  There's not a frame of this film that looks like anything you could imagine or expect, but, curiously, the general arc of the narrative is very predictable.  Long before Duenna disgorged her ravenous insect alter-ego, I expected her to turn into a carnivorous bug.  And the little male figures with their watery blue eyes, tiny arms, and badly abraded faces are clearly victims of their lust for the monstrous heroine -- they get, as it were,what they deserve.

This is a nasty little film, about 23 minutes long, and it's exquisitely horrible.  The images are all imperfect, half glimpsed, and the camera breaks the action, such as it is, into a montage of very short scenes that succeed one another almost too fast for the eye to register what is happening.  The animation of the puppets is herky-jerky and intentionally looks like clockwork automatons.  The stylish pictorial features of the film can't compensate, however, for the rather primitive narrative. It's threadbare -- there's simply not much there.