This film is part of a ‘Human Rights Watch’ festival that is currently taking place at the Cinematheque Ontario. The film follows a cluster of Bosnian women and girls who try to continue making a living after the men in their lives have been taken by war. The women, who already have a shaky footing in life, are disturbed by two men who show up trying to get their signatures in order to acquire their land. As their success in this endeavor becomes evident, tensions build in the women and in the plot. My main problem with the film is that the women had very little redeeming value; I think that the absence of men had somehow put all of them on permanent PMS overdrive, and I couldn’t stand any of them. While this is probably the point, it made for an irritating two hours. While a similar plot synopsis can be drawn from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the difference is that Almodóvar sees the humor of the situation and lacks pretension. The film only manages to become a bit more interesting by including a few elements of magical realism.
I’ve noticed recently that magic and spiritual realism have been making a huge comeback in the art and film communities so far this century. On a recent trip to New York, almost every gallery and museum that I went into had some sort of exhibition up that showed work by artists who are studying miracles, ghosts, Zen meditation and hypnosis, religious parades, divine lights, etc. Films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Semih Kaplanolgu take notice of ethereal and folkish occurrences in the quaint lives of their protagonists, and acknowledge the religious experience of witnessing an ominous light or vacuum, some natural, some man made. My main annoyance with Snow, is that it has the pieces to have been an important human rights or magical realism entry, but is significant to either because it handles these elements absurdly and makes it all look silly. A boy who goes through a brief stint of aging rapidly when he has a traumatic experience made me laugh and then cringe, as the boy is suddenly shown with much longer hair (I think pretty obviously a wig) at one point. Several people in my theatre giggled, but at least I finally understood why Begic felt the need to insert abrupt chapter breaks that told me what day it was, as it initially seemed as if either a large chunk of time had unexpectedly passed, or the boy was playing a silly game on everyone. Not to mention the snow in the last scene of 1997, a Magnolia or Haggis-Crash-esque divine sign of exhaustion and fateful intervention.