HKIFF Review: Balentes is a haunting and singular work

Rendered in stunning monochromatic colorscapes, and full of textures and details you want to reach out and touch, Giovanni Columbu's Balentes is one of the most stunning movies I've seen in some time. This movie feels like a memory, a ghost story, a historical relic that must be handled with care, lest it crumble to dust and vanish forever. The film is dedicated to Columbu's grandmother, who told him the story on which the film is based. Reading that at the film's end felt like a final puzzle piece clicking into place, like oh, that's why this movie feels the way it does. It's haunting, grounded, tragic. I don't know that I've ever seen anything like it.

Balentes came on my radar last year, and re-emerged this year when I was looking at the program for the Hong Kong International Film Festival, where the film is one of a few animated entries showing. I'm so glad I finally got to see it, and glad to say that it was worth the wait.

With a movie like this, I think you have to start with the visuals. Most of the film is rendered in shades of gray, with occasional dips into sepia tones, or a little splash of blue here or there. This monochromatic approach makes for so many stunning frames, like this movie could be hanging frame-by-frame in a gallery. The settings often have these gorgeous textures, globs of paint that you want to poke, scratches and scuffs. Rotoscope techniques were used for the characters, who often appear as silhouettes, ambling through these massive spaces, sometimes even voids, with a heaviness befitting of this story.

I watched this movie with my mouth agape, muttering "Oh my god" over and over again. I kept being struck by how gorgeous it was on a very simple, wow-look-at-that level, but also at the ingenuity and creativity of how different scenes and moments are rendered. For instances, the shifting rocky ridges as a train barrels through feel like living Rorschach tests. Human faces are often devoid of features -- they're gray and flat, no eyes, that sort of thing -- until they're not. It's clear so much thought and care was put into how to make each moment land with just the right amount of oomph. The visuals are spare, but the impact is unsparing. 

Equally impactful is the film's approach to sound. I'm not sure exactly how the sound was handled for this film. Maybe it was recorded at the same time as the filming for the rotoscope, a la Ghost Cat Anzu? The dialogue and ambient noise have such a raw, grounded quality that really pulls you into this story. The music has that feeling of being pulled off of old records with well-worn grooves, providing an additional layer of haunting-ness to the proceedings. The beautiful marriage of the austere animation and the natural sound make this a movie you can't look (or listen?) away from.

The story, unfortunately, is one that will always be timely, because it is, in its way, a war story. Two friends, Ventura and Michele, want to free the military's horses, knowing that they will eventually be sent into war zones, to their deaths. You see these two young men grappling with if they can pull this off, and how, and what it might mean. It's act of kindness and empathy in a cruel world, a chance to glimpse and grab a kind of freedom while living in the shadow of uncaring systems that care little for the well-being of living creatures.

It's quite a simple story, but one that's evocatively told from a technical perspective and on a narrative level. There's a bit of jumping around, creating some intrigue and mystery, giving you a glimpse of the tragedy to come. It feels like someone is telling you the story, remembering different details, circling back to moments they forgot to mention before, painting a picture bit by bit until the totality of it is at last revealed. And the film clocks in at barely over an hour, so it's as efficient and economical in its story-telling as it is on its visual and aural fronts.

As the credits rolled on Balentes, I found myself feeling a sense of awe. It is such a unique movie in its subject matter, its technical approach, its visuals, everything. And beyond being singular, it's also good. It's not just worth watching to see something new and interesting (though that would be reason enough), but also to be moved by the plight of these characters, to experience a story well-told, to spend time in these evocative places. It's a stunner.