The true way is along a rope that is not crossed high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling, rather than to be walked upon -- Franz Kafka. Lines of caution and despair, they provide the epigraph to this startling anime film, inspired by a Kafka short story of the same title. What director Koji Yamamura and his intrepid team of animators do well is take a spare and barebones story by the Czech writer and create a disturbingly oneiric vision of the world like no other.
A
Country Doctor takes just over 20 minutes to accomplish its purpose,
breathing life as it does into a brooding tale about the human
condition. It opens, forebodingly, in a country doctor’s courtyard as he
prepares to answer an emergency deep in the night. What complicates his
impending journey is a snow blizzard sweeping through the terrain. To
add to his woes, his horse has died during the cold, wintry hours. His
servant girl Rosa tries to look for a replacement, knocking from door to
door, but to no avail. But just as the country doctor starts to rue his
luck, a groom comes out of nowhere with a pair of mysterious horses.
The groom turns out to be a malicious figure who telegraphs his carnal
intentions upon Rosa, alarming the country doctor just as he is about to
leave. He has little time to react, it seems, as he is hurried off on
his rig.
Arriving
at the end of his journey, the country doctor is ushered to the sickbed
of a boy , who whispers to him his intention to die. At first the
country doctor finds nothing wrong with the child, no fever, no worrying
symptom of any kind. But a wound in the boy’s side is revealed on
closer inspection; the country doctor just missed it until it is hinted
to him. It’s a festering wound, the size of a palm, full of wriggling
worms. Stripped naked by the boy’s family, sung to, and made to keep a
close vigil on the boy, the country doctor reassures his patient but
escapes the sickroom as soon as the boy falls asleep. Naked and freezing
on horseback, he rides blindly through icy snow and buffeting winds of
the night.
This
short précis of the film’s storyline follows Kafka’s prose with close
exactitude. Even so, this anime gives free rein to the expansive
imaginations of its animators. It’s a combination of story and execution
that produces a film ripe with multivocal meanings. The country doctor,
who at the end rushes homewards, or nowhere, through blizzards of snow,
is plagued with various exigencies, but seems blindly cognizant of
them, or chooses to remain ignorant. Neither does it seem probable for
him to redeem his servant girl from the groom’s raging lust, nor will he
see through his wounded patient’s crucial hours. What does the elusive wound represent? What does the doctor's undressing mean? Who is the groom? Does
the country doctor stand, as critics claim, for the modern man too
deadened to respond to the real emergencies of existence?
The
beauty of Yamamura’s film lies not only in its unsettling story but in
its visually gripping evocation of a dream world. Rendered in stark,
monochromatic colors, both characters and context evoke surreal and
expressionistic 2-d representations that complement its existential
themes. The animation revels in modernist touches: distortions and
elongations of human figures (faces, limbs and torsos), the elements,
and the inanimate. This is all occasioned, it seems, by the particulars
of Kafka’s story: the swirly, inky night, the driving snows, the
worm-infested wound, the dream-like goings-on. Complemening it all is
the ghostly presence of storytellers intoning like the narrators of a
Noh play.
Yamamura’s
A Country Doctor is a triumph of anime filmmaking that has to be seen
to be appreciated and cherished. Without going overboard, it takes here
and there, successfully synthesizing all manner of influences: from
Frederic Back to Yuri Norstein, from Die Brucke to German Expressionism.
Rarely do we encounter adaptations that do justice to their sources. A
Country Doctor has the distinction of surpassing its basis, Kafka be
damned.
reviewed: July 3, 2010
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