Siin me oleme (Here We Are)

Siin me oleme

I watched the weirdest movie I have ever seen last week.

It was an Estonian film from the late 70's about a bunch of crazy city folk who turn up at a farm full of crazy country folk and then do nothing at all, really.

It was basically a bunch of sight-gags stretched out into sketches and then stitched together into a plot.

And it made no sense at all.

Things would happen, and there was no reason for them to happen.  Occasionally, this would lead to other weird things happening, but mostly the new weird things were somewhat independant of the old weird things.

Plot lines suddenly disappeared as if they never existed.  New storylines would appear from nowhere.  I found myself constantly gesticulating at the TV saying "What are you doing?  Why are you doing that?  Who are you people?"

There were characters who had no back story.  Of the three city folk who turned up, one was never explained.  She was just in the car with the others, and apparently brought along specifically to be a gorgeous red-head (in a wig).  Who was she?  Was she a daughter?  A sister?  A friend?

Why did she flounce around and flirt shamelessly for the first half of the film, and then suddenly turn into a sharp-witted shrew in the second half?

Where did all the other people on the farm come from whenever an audience was needed for the fat city woman to do something ridiculous?  Where did they all go in the meantime?

At one point I wasn't sure if the farmer's wife was talking to the cow she was milking or the fat city woman.  Then again, the lipsyncing was so bad I wasn't sure who was talking half the time.

And then there were the musical numbers.  They came out of nowhere, lasted for approximately two verses, and then disappeared.  And they weren't like musical numbers you get in normal musicals - where the song expresses part of what's going on in the character's life at that point.  It was more like the characters were just bursting into song because they had a tune in their head at that point in time, and decided to sing it out loud (with magical musical accompaniment).

Much like an average day in office for me, but still a bit weird for a movie.

The whole thing was a bit crazy-pants, to be honest.  Yet strangely compelling.  Nothing much was happening at all, but I had to keep watching to see what would happen next.