Zift – 5

In marked contrast to Vacation – who would think the first two films I see at the Santa Barbara Film Festival would both take place inside prisons! – the Bulgarian esthetic is apparently raucous and messy. Or, you could say, loud and lewd. The story involves a petty criminal who wades through unbearable shit in jail and out while protecting a rare black diamond, only to be betrayed in the end. His Steven-Seagal-toughness elicits our admiration, although it doesn’t quite explain how he fights through iridium poisoning and numerous jolts and blows to the head. Perhaps if one were Bulgarian the references to the Communist takeover would make the film symbolically coherent. Perhaps it would also make the characters, the stories they tell, Moth’s name and the aphorisms about shit – “zift” – meaningful in a way that escaped me.

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