By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Emil Christov
Starring: Lilia Abadjieva | Mihail Bilalov | Rousy Chanev | Ruscen Vidinliev
Original language title: Cvetat na hameleona
Country: bulgaria
Year: 2013
Running time: 111
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2311822/combined
Thom says: “Batko becomes the master in his creation of an invisible web of informants by a group of revolutionaries that end up spying on each other. He controls his own secret fount of information. After the fall of communism, he is able to bring down the government. While the film starts out brilliantly enough it descends into a sloppy spoof that hasn’t much to offer. 2 cats
“Director Hristow available for Q&A.”
Kyle says: “Film Comment Editor Gavin Smith said, ‘This could be the tipping point of Bulgarian cinema.’ At the least, THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON is the first Bulgarian film presented by New Directors/New Films in 35 years. The writer is Vladislav Todorov, adapting his 2010 novel titled Zincograph. (Note: Merriam-Webster defines zincography as ‘the art or process of engraving or photoengraving letterpress printing surfaces on zinc.’) This wildly satirical political thriller about secret police informants is set just before and after the end of communism. To attempt a list of narrative events is to waste words and time. To say that the film commences in color with an older female relative with her adolescent male charge consulting a high party official on the boy’s addiction to ‘onanism,’ or that the film ends in black and white with a parody of a scene from CASABLANCA that owes more to Nikolai Gogol or H.H. Munro than Hollywood is almost as pointless. Perhaps it is enough to say the boy grows up to become a spy recruited to infiltrate a literature club obsessed with the deconstruction of a ‘forbidden’ novel called Zincograph, is terminated for professional incompetence, and founds his own fake service to spy on and inform against chosen targets. The film draws its strength from communism’s excesses occasionally seeming so outrageous as to overwhelm the demands of fiction, such as a lengthy disquisition on the fate of the Fourth Nail, since only three were actually used to crucify Jesus Christ. Lead actor Ruscen Vidinliev is properly charismatic, looking like a cross between Javier Bardem and Jude Law, which secures the audience’s attention in bearing witness to the outrageous acts committed by his character, named Batko Stamenov.
“At the Q & A afterward, the novel’s author and screenwriter Vladislav Todorov said that the film was intended to be the opposite of the Oscar-winning THE LIVES OF OTHERS in its focus on impostors, and its refusal to let informers and party hacks off the hook for intellectual reasons. The evening’s most sobering comment came from a woman in the audience who
had lived in Bulgaria and said that however horrible life was under a communist regime, it was even worse now that Bulgaria had ‘embraced democracy, with rampant poverty, corruption, depression and suicides. 4 cats
“Thursday, March 21, 2013, New Directors/New Films at the Walter Reade Theater, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.”