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Memorable, crazy movie

A lot of fun.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

I admit: experimental shorts aren't my forté, but I checked out Dym (Smoke, for us Americans) and I liked it. Weird, yes. Different, definitively. Aimless? Well, blow away the smoke and see for yourself.Typically, in Reevesreviews fashion, I would write up a synopsis, but there really isn't much of a plot here. You have a young (attractive) male in a flat, but then, suddenly, he's a chauffeur to a heavier-set male to an adult club. There's a woman in red appearing in & out of the picture. And there's a tape recorder to witness it all.That's pretty much it. No dialogue. No character names, other than those mentioned on IMDb. All style, little direction.And yet, it's an interesting and well-shot short film. I was just told about this short recently, but apparently, it's been around since 2007. I would be highly interested in seeing a feature (or full) length film by director/editor/writer Grzegorz Cisiecki.Hey (Americanized): Greg! Pick up the camera again and film more. This short took talent and an excellent eye. Please do more, and I'll be in line on opening night.

Much like the short films and feature debut of David Lynch—hell, throw in his last release Inland Empire too—Belarusian writer/director Grzegorz Cisiecki's Dym is both stunning visually and experimental in its story structure and motives. It begins with a young man, shirtless, moving away from the flowing clouds out his window to the corner table of his desolate room, sitting down and pressing play on the old Sanyo tape recorder in his hands. From here it all goes into the surreal madness the film's tagline foreshadows, showing vignettes of a balding man in a car backseat feeding on something juicy with a hint of humiliation once our lead, now dressed in a trench coat, approaches him; a brothel shrouded in a smoky haze of drugs, anonymity, and sexuality; and the brighter, quieter moments of the nameless gentleman and the woman he loves.Many may ask the question, "What does it all mean?" And to that I reply, "Anything you want." Cisiecki could very well have made a piece so personal that it touches him at his core, but what its meaning is to him is meaningless to how it affects you. The duration may leave you in a state of utter confusion—perhaps even anger at its incomprehensibility or in your own inability to understand—but if just one frame hits you with a powerful blow to your soul, well then the film is a success. For me there were many gorgeous instances burned into my mind, from the mesmerizing beauty of a girl at the end, covering her face with her hands and in turn her hair, sticking in place, seeming to be a shot played back in reverse; the bordello scene of danger and fear on behalf of the lead, with its masks, its brazen edits with malicious intent, and the red-tinted view of a balcony above with the feeding man, this time with hair and a beard, smiling oddly with the girl he's chosen; and the innocent look of the same actor in the car's backseat, the embarrassment of his actions left unpunished.It is that shame that sticks with me the most in my understanding of the piece. To me, it is a story of the death of love and the tearstained shame of those a broken-hearted soul attempts to capture in order to fill the void left. Here is a man who has lost his soulmate, whether from death, a break-up, or a myriad of other possibilities, that has just awoken from a night of empty passion with a woman he barely knows. Taking his recorder—containing the last remnants of the girl he once spent a day in the park with, lying together, hands clasped, staring at the sky—he tries desperately to remember happier times. But the static we hear play back amidst the haunting score by Aleksandr Poroch and Rashid Brocca, doing their best Badalamenti, mixes together the joys of complete glimpses and the horrors of disjointed darkness from the abyss he has begun to wade in, barely keeping afloat. The surreal moments of blood, sex, and tears are the pain of his soul and his heart—the muscle that I could infer is what the man in the car has been eating, he being the facilitator of his night of carnal pleasure devoid of emotion.I could be way off base—I almost hope I am so as to take from Dym what is purely mine and mine alone. But this is what I beg anyone who decides to watch to do. Go in with an open mind and discover something about yourself through its visuals—there is no speech for the seven-minute runtime—not for meaning in the pictures themselves. Cisiecki gives us the line that this is "The story of the person who became the captive of surrealistic madness," but perhaps the person he speaks of is you the viewer. All the actors, Grzegorz Golaszewski, Bartlomiej Nowosielski, Oriana Soika, Marta Szumiel, and others, are wonderful, yet, in the end, they are merely vessels for our own demons to inhabit in a story personal to us. The lead is you; the curly haired girl, your love; the new woman, all those that have come and gone, never comparing to the one and only. We all live inside the smoky haze; it's only when it clears that we should ever take pause and take a stand to not let the chance pass us by.

A terrific short film, with a lot of inspired imagery: the woman drawing the hair around her face, the final shot of the man in profile in the foreground with the woman out of focus behind him, the nicely framed moment when the woman first walks into the room and goes to the window. The images flow together with a smooth, dreamy logic -- I'm thinking of moments like the one where the man steps out of bed and the film cuts to the woman's foot coming down onto the floor, a transition that is both arresting and seamless. The influences of Lynch and Kubrick are obvious, but it's one thing to be influenced and another thing to carry off the influences as well as they're done here. I also thought that the Zulawski film Possession was behind a lot of Smoke's tone, and the storyline here follows Zulawski's method of shifting a troubled relationship into a paranoid fantasy version of itself. Definitely worth watching.

Dym (2007) **** (out of 4) Normally I'd start off a review with a look at the plot but that's pretty hard to do with this surreal film from director Grzegorz Cisiecki. What we're basically got is a 7-minute short where we see countless surreal images all centered around a man and possibly his girlfriend or some other woman. Director Cisiecki apparently went on a pretty large campaign to try and get his film noticed by as many people as possible. I personally received an e-mail that directed me to the film and this is something that happens quite often but most of the time I'm letdown with some sort of film that is nice but nothing special. That certainly wasn't the case here because DYM is certainly one of the best shorts I've seen in recent years and I'd say that even Bunuel and Lynch would be proud to view it. I think it's deadly hard to try and make a surreal film because there are so many ways to fail and so many possible ways for the viewer to roll their eyes and think to themselves that the film is just trying to be clever or that the director is just throwing at non-stop images that mean nothing and add up to nothing. What I found so amazing about DYM is that every image just fueled into me like a drug and I couldn't help but get more. Each image had 100% of my attention and I couldn't help to get to the next image just to see where the film was going to go next even if that next image just took us off into a different direction. The film contains some very impressive editing, terrific cinematography and the performances are good for what we get to see. We're treated with an effective music score that perfectly fits the mood of the film and there's no question that you'll get sucked into the bizarre atmosphere. I watch hundreds of shorts each and every year from those made in the 1880s up to those of today. Most of them are nice for brief entertainment but then you move onto the next one without putting too much thought into what you've actually seen. DYM, on the other hand, really feeds your imagination and I can't help but hope we get to see more work from this young director in the future. He certainly has every right to be proud of this film and want as many people to see it as possible.