AFFF log

pregnant girl travels on train with unknown destination through dystopian landscape
Links: AFFF / imdb

Very very grim; no-one will deny that.
Quite poetic; many disagree, judging from the mere 5.27 (out of 10) it currently received from the audience. Me, I absolutely adored it. You have been warned.

As soon as the openinglines came through the speakers I knew I'd love this one, like I need to listen to Cohen's parlando version of "Democracy" every 3 to 4 months, alone, somewhere after 1am. This film is extremely poetic for me. I am not describing the monologue as a poem, I'm saying that the film is not about a realistic making-sense story or believable character(-arc). Instead it references through visual, textual and stylistic methods deeply human emotions, trying to break through the filter that every day morphs so much of our thoughts and feelings, directly into primal instincts like agression, love, fear and their more subtle descendants.

The train and landscape are CGI, the humans are gritty manual drawings. This juxtaposition estranges its already dark settings from the daily world we experience around us, their difference disorients. There was exactly one short cut in which this didn't work for me: somewhere near the beginning gritty handdrawn humans are seen as reflections on the CGI train. I wrote down many possible references that the film offered to me through visual or textual hints. There is no use in sharing these since they are highly personal and I'd better think them over and watch the film again. This might sound as if I was constantly crossreferencing, deducting, stripping away the layers to reveal the aphorisms, but nothing could be further from the truth. I let the film grab me by the hand and pull me through the raw, neverending dust that a world without hope has to offer. But now and then ideas, no, feelings, surfaced, hints of possible references.

Rating: 9