On DVD: "Essential Killing"

2011 has been something of a comeback year for the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski. Emerging just ahead of the BFI's revival of his cult 70s item Deep End (reissued on DVD this Monday) there's his new and potentially divisive feature Essential Killing, which isolates a contemporary concern - the conflict in Afghanistan - then keeps pulling further and further away from the specifics until the audience is left squinting through their horn-rimmed spectacles, either in anticipation or outright puzzlement; it ends up more or less to the Middle East what Gus Van Sant's Elephant was to American high-school massacres.

Vincent Gallo plays a Taliban fighter who, while being transported from one holding facility to another, escapes from his American captors. Shackled and jumpsuited, he shuffles off into the snow and the night, and - pursued by the authorities - finds himself obliged to take further lives in order to keep up his relentless forward progression. The result is a pared-back, existential escape drama: The Fugitive à la Robert Bresson, perhaps. You'd certainly be hard-pressed to describe Essential Killing as a political piece, exactly, even if the lead character displays much of the resourcefulness, resilience and adaptability traditionally ascribed to Taliban fighters.

The absence of explicit rhetoric - indeed, of anything much in the way of dialogue whatsoever - suggests Skolimowski was aiming for something altogether more abstract: a parable or allegory of the human urge to survive that, just perhaps, mirrors the circumstances of the film's own production. The action Essential Killing describes has a piecemeal, disconnected quality about it, patched together by a filmmaker himself having to go on the run across several nations to secure the required funding. The woodland the fighter heads into appears more Arctic than Afghan, and actually more Scandinavian than the Russian hinterland the press notes and some reviews led me to expect; Pavel Mykietyn's score hits notes more commonly heard in Japanese Noh theatre; and Gallo aside, the only other recognisable face in the cast belongs to the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, essaying a mute Slavic innkeeper.

The generalised nature of the film results in an anti-hero who scarcely seems human as such: flashbacks fill us in in the vaguest of ways about his earlier existence as a Muslim and a family man, and only in the end credits do we learn his (heavily symbolic) name. He's more like a crash test dummy, a Guantanamo Jesus, variously persecuted and bashed around in a fashion that meshes with both the Christ of Mel Gibson's Passion and Gallo's own, long-established martyr complex. (I'm guessing that, when chased by attack dogs, the actor likely had those reviewers who went after The Brown Bunny on his mind.)

Needless to say, I wasn't entirely taken in by Skolimowski's project: I became aware that, as Gallo goes hungrily after a lactating Russian woman 's milk, a Little Britain-derived utterance of "bitty" from the cheap seats would only just make the sequence more absurd than it already is; the cold chill of the exteriors looks to have seeped into the narrative; and a percentage of the killing is so superfluous that the whole often feels like an exercise in getting us to empathise to any degree with a man like Raoul Moat. It is, all the same, highly skilful filmmaking, and Skolimowski works his soundtrack double time so as to compensate for the spareness on display elsewhere. That spareness - the insistence that this is what this character would do in this situation - is presumptuous and confrontational, to say the least, but undeniably striking, and in its own way true to the abiding theme of exile. When you're this busy just trying to survive, maybe there's no time for anything but the essentials.

Essential Killing is available on DVD from Artificial Eye.