Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1996)
A film review by David Cowen
Copyright 1996 David Cowen
It seems strange when watching a film which consists almost entirely of images which can only be called unique to think obsessively while viewing the movie about how derivative the movie really is. While INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA features some of the most striking images seen in any film this year, the plot and characterizations which drive the film seem to be taken from other recent films -- mixed together, and put together in a way that can be best described as puzzling.
This decade has brought us a surprising number of moody, ethereal films about attending a school on servitude in an European country: Lars Von Trier's 1991 EUROPA (ZENTROPA in the US) featured an American who traveled to Germany immediately after World War II to offer the Germans some "sympathy" by serving on a passenger car on the Zentropa line. Guy Maddin's 1992 CAREFUL was an incredible acid-trip sendup of the German "Mountain Film", featuring a main character who goes to school to become a servant. Both EUROPA and CAREFUL featured incredibly innovative images -- EUROPA, shot in cinemascope and fluctuating between black and white and color. often featuring both on the same screen, and CAREFUL with its garish tinted colors and deteriorated look. Both films are very different from one another, and both, in my opinion, are of great value.
INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA also takes place in a school, one where Jakob (Mark Rylance) is training as a butler under the watch of Lisa (Alice Krige) and Herr Benjamenta (Gottfried John). The film spans the time in which Jakob joins the school, and ends at the school's demise. The Brothers Quay use the school less as a statement on servitude or any other topic but as a funhouse in which to play their visual tricks: the camera often shoots across the room to reveal the writing on an obscure contraption, or purposefully blur as to make an image look like something else. Little is established other than the basics: after Jakob enters the school, he becomes a troublemaker -- but becomes respected both by Lisa and Herr Benjamenta, both of whom view him as a confidant. While Jakob, and many of the other characters spend much of the film engaging in talk that could at best be called philosophizing, little of it holds together, and the film seems to lack any sort of coherant meaning.
Instead, the viewer focuses on the images: often startling, and often beautiful in a gothic sense. The Brothers Quay obsess on dust and thread -- INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA is one of the few films in which there is such a thing as a "gratuitous thread shot". Light and shadows flash across walls, as if the sun is moving through the film at a much faster rate than in real life. The film is sprinkled with odd visual jokes and puns which are often as obscure or obtuse as they are funny.
Unfortunately, there isn't much else in this film to admire. The use of a butler school seems completely perfunctory, and there isn't anything on that topic to be found here that wasn't already covered in more depth in EUROPA or CAREFUL, nor do the images seem as shocking or beautiful when compared with the elegance of the aforementioned two films. While the Brothers Quay are extremely capable when creating stop-motion animation, they seem lost as to what to do with the human element, and much of the film seems to be filler to take the film from image to image. Ultimately, INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA is something of a beautiful, confusing bore. If you're interested in seeing INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA, I'd instead recommend seeing EUROPA or CAREFUL (the latter of which is playing at the Music Box theater in Chicago in less than a month).
-- signed: ESCHATFISCHE, david h t t p : / /w w w . f i s c h e . c o m (esch@fische.com) ------------------------------------------------------
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