Day 13: Film with Great Sets
I’m not usually a fan of heavy-handed satire and its 1h36m run can feel
excruciatingly longer, but this film makes such mesmerisingly theatric, living
use of its setting (in the singular) that it has to be my choice for this one.
Eldar Ryazanov and Emil Braginsky’s “Garage” or гараж (1979) is as
claustrophobic, intense, and play-like as Sidney Lumet’s “Twelve Angry Men”
(1957), with earnest people with such vast gulfs of dissent between them,
effectively locked in together to figure out the hardly figureoutable - in this
case, a garage collective meet at the Museum of Extinct & Endangered
Species at night, and must decide which members will lose their parking spaces
when a highway will be built nearby. It’s a fierce but weary deconstruction of
a whole lot of things, democracy, bureaucracy, socialist stagnation,
evolutionary survival, fairness, justice, as the frustrated and panicky members
- meek and overbearing alike - argue, revolt, conspire, protest, plead, divide,
and unite, all under the watchful (and frankly, somewhat concerned) glassy eyes
of the fantastical stuffed prey, predators, and early humans preserved and on
display all around them, both echoing the jungle-law modern mess on display and
maybe the constant gentle crumble of human progress Xo
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