Veiko Õunpuu's film director' debut Empty (Tühirand) based on Mati Unt's short story of the same title, is undoubtedly a success. It is remarkable that, in his first (short) film, the director finds his own pictorial language and independent aesthetic solution. The film has provided the perception in Unt's prose with a pictorial, personal equivalent. The script is credible, showing a real insight into the characters. And, what is perhaps most important, Empty does not wish to attract large audiences by compromising, nor does it aspire towards a certain target group. At the same time it is quite obvious that the film-makers have taken the topic seriously. The result is a cramp-free film with a personal signature.

In order to find out how the film came about, and talk about its story, it is necessary to mention the motifs on which it relies. The plot can be summarised in a few sentences: the intellectual Mati (Rain Tolk), his wife Helina (Maarja Jakobson) and the violinist Eduard (Taavi Eelmaa) take a trip to the country, to the beach. Eduard seduces Mati's wife; Mati then makes love to Marina (Mirtel Pohla) in a hayloft and abandons his wife. But Helina returns to her husband and dumps Eduard. At the end of the film the trio return to town and the initial relations have been re-established. Mati, however, escapes through the toilet window at the airport.

Considered schematically, the relationship game in this film is quite banal. Motifs on which the game rests make the whole situation increasingly complicated and deeper. Repetition and over-coding reveal to the viewer a grotesque and sad loneliness.

Over-coding. Game and Angst

I

The mutual communication of the characters in Empty is extremely dramatic throughout. The dramatic element is so strong that feelings and love assume the form of a love triangle; drama is a condition to interpret people and the relations between them.

To describe the relations between the characters, comparison with theatre comes in handy. There are necessary conditions for theatre (someone else, i.e. the viewer, and conflict are needed for dramaturgy). We can even speak of transferring the theatre model into daily life. However, the romantic notion that the vertical dimension of a personality directly depends on being in a dramatic situation acquires here an obvious ironic meaning. In this film, dramatic situations are realised in the grotesque. Theatre circumstances as the foundation of mutual relations lead the relations of the characters in Empty into an 'obligatory' shift.

Different models function on different language levels, and employing the theatre (i.e. artistic level) model on the level of everyday life results in the double coding of the meaning. In the structure of the daily (language) level, simplification now takes place in the course of the reorganisation. The rules of the theatre (artistic level) model realised on the daily level introduce a certain cyclic nature and also exclude anything occasional. Relations in the film thus develop to the point of conflict, in order to then seek a new and obligatory conflict. This is a repetition that does not seem to have an end. In relationships (dramas) it is rather a rule that when relations reach conflict, those involved try to restore the previous harmony or find a new one. In Empty, however, conflict is coded in the relationships from the start, because introducing the theatre model into daily life means that the relationships can only exist in a continuing dramatic form. Or, in other words, spectators and conflict are always obligatory. Harmony must be continually rejected.

The situation thus emerges where mutual relations do not proceed (can no longer proceed) 'directly'; the power lines are instead constantly being re-played and thus relations change within one network. Love cannot be separated from self-confirmation or, as Mati tells Eduard: 'Why do you want to seduce my wife? I would have dumped her long ago if you hadn't interfered. Now I must start loving her again, although I don't want to do that.' Existentially they thus remain, or choose to remain, on their own in the reality of a game, although solitude is exactly what is impossible to endure. In front of the viewers, the characters are in a kind of grotesque torment. The relationship game that the characters perhaps do not have to admit to themselves establishes roles with fixed rules, which on the one hand create identity and on the other obstruct. However, if life is a work of drama, the role is compulsory, even if the role is annoying. And, although the rival is 'unappealing', he is needed for the reason of self-perception. Frustration and destruction are inescapable.

In Empty, destruction, demolishing oneself and relationships, becomes the foundation of personality and relations, and thus operates paradoxically as a principle that builds and creates identity. At the same time, destructiveness is also carried by the wish to reach personal reality. This is most obvious in the protagonist Mati: behind his disdain for life and his breaking up of relationships glows the romantic aspiration for truth. The force behind the characters is, on the one hand, drama, destructiveness, a peculiar game and, on the other, bitterness and anxiety.

II

In the scene where Mati has warmed up his old friendship with Marina, and has just had a significant encounter with her in the hayloft, he says casually: 'I wish my name was Peep.' And he repeats: 'Peep, Peep.' Peep is a palindrome, such as 'race car' or 'level'. Whether said forwards or backwards, you get the same name, the same word and meaning. It is difficult to pinpoint the reason for Mati's spleen. (The theatricality of relations in the film can certainly be seen and determined as a specific language level, whereas it is impossible to determine spleen. Spleen does not depend on any language level but, as an existential inevitability, it is in opposition to everything else.) Mati's spleen may even be deeper than the need to find reality through destruction. It seems to me that the cause for Mati's spleen is hidden in the relations between man and the world. It is frustrating to know that nobody is in fact listening to anybody else.

Mati shouts at Marina: 'Listen to me! Why don't you listen to me?!'
Marina: 'I am listening.'
Mati: 'So what did you hear.'
Marina: 'But you haven't said anything.'

The world is a place where people do not hear one another. What then can reality be like?

Or an earlier episode where Mati tells his wife Helina: 'You are just a piece of life I hang on to. I love you, but you are not distinguished from the world. You are part of the world.'

The film ends with Mati fleeing, which is simultaneously real and symbolic, sublime and low. Mati escapes through the airport toilet window, against the background of Tõnis Mägi singing The Song of Songs.

Mati flees. The last shot of the film, followed by the epilogue by the neighbour (Juhan Ulfsak), shows an open window. The window as an image remains ambivalent, constituting both an entrance and exit, and forming an interesting pair with the frequent view of the horizon in the film. Branches of trees are seen through the window. Mati is gone. Mati has left. Has he been wanting to leave all along? If yes, then to where? Away from the world? Is reality distinguished from the world? Or... maybe Mati does not want to leave the world, but within the world he wants to go where existence contains something uniform and indivisible. Peep is Peep. Race car is race car. Level is level.

Repetition and aesthetics

I

The director Õunpuu has also studied painting. This has obviously helped him. Õunpuu perceives a shot as a picture and can be both serious and playful, achieving balance. Empty relies on carefully composed shots that occasionally resemble paintings. This kind of approach is justified here.

The dramatic pathos of the characters harmonises with the composed shots. The picture at times augments the drama of the relations in a bright mood, which helps to emphasise the grotesque. In the space where the characters move, nobody has any pretensions of realism, chance, the ordinary. Instead everything is staged. The realistic, ordinary and chance are all expressed in sudden emotions (that the characters are unable to dramatise between themselves), and seem truly clumsy. 'Passionate' bursts of emotion basically seem one big blunder: the way Eduard kisses Helena is a proper cock-up, Mati's encounter with Marina in the hayloft is a formal full stop to the progress of events, and the men's clumsy struggle ends with a mere thrashing around on the ground. Supreme drama and clumsiness exist side by side.

It is quite extraordinary that the long pauses, the silent snuffling in the film, do not seem to drag on and on. They ring true. They are justified as part of the general manner of the film and function in the grotesque plan. (Mention should be made of another, slightly ironic shade: Empty is an Estonian film, which means it has long and endlessly stretching pauses.) Simple sentences are uttered with noticeable pathos. Words are not to be wasted.

The concurrent motif of the film is repetition. Realising the theatre model in life, as mentioned before, results in development not from conflict to harmony, but from conflict to conflict. We could add that the conflict always has a similar character. The episodes of the film, the changes in relationships, are all variants of the same event. The core of the plot repeats itself. Eduard seduces Mati's wife. Mati (involuntarily) gets his wife back from Eduard and says to Eduard: 'You can have her back if you, if you're smart enough.'

The story of Empty resembles/relies on the cyclic perception of time characteristic of mythological plots, where events do not proceed linearly, but repeat with a certain predestination.

The film never explains why the relations are as they are; rather, it seems as if they have always been like that. The beginning and end of the film happen in the same place as well: Mati and his wife not really close to each other, Eduard somewhere in the background, biding his time. The repetition is endless. It could perhaps even be called a ritual. And when Mati escapes through the window at the end of the film, this constitutes an attempt to break out of a closed room.

Scenes on the beach are repeated too, i.e. what is repeated is the expanse, views stretching to the horizon. On the beach, the tragic blends with the comic, solitude becomes existential. The distant is close, and the view is framed by the horizon.

II

Every man in the film has a moustache, including the episodic characters who only appear very briefly: a neighbour, an old man with a beer bottle, identical men in sports dress trying to fix the car, a passenger in the airport waiting lounge et al. Having a moustache acquires a double meaning. Throughout history, the moustache has been a sign of a certain attitude to life, just like long hair, having no hair, having a beard...

In Empty, the moustache is tragi-comic. Has this something to do with nostalgia? The principle of similarity is significant as well. Referring to a similar feature or attitude is more interesting, because the male (main) characters in the film are divided into oppositions, forming pairs of doubles. Rivals Mati-Eduard can be seen as the opposition barbarian-cultured. Eduard, who knows the Latin names of many plants, was often ill as a child and thinks that was the reason why he became a violinist. The barbarian Mati, on the other hand, drinks vodka and urinates in the sea. Eduard remarks about Mati: 'No escape from the barbarians.' However, Mati and Eduard gang up against the neighbour, which could be seen on the axis intelligence-lack of intelligence. The neighbour is a man who knows the rules, but has no clue why the rules are as they are.

Neighbour: 'You can't sleep here.'
Mati: 'Why?'
Neighbour: 'Such are the rules.'

Having already mentioned the closeness of Empty to mythological texts, the appearance of Doppelgängers is also the result of cyclic texts being transformed into linear. To sum up, we could say, from the mythological point of view, all the (moustached) male characters could be regarded as one portrait, one ambivalent hero. Might this tragi-comic moustachioed hero also be called Peep?

Instead of a conclusion, I will offer a few words about the director and the actors. Taavi Eelmaa and Maarja Jakobson have long since proved their worth in our films and also put in splendid performances, whereas a real acting surprise here is Rain Tolk's debut. One of the best possible compliments: the man does not seem to be acting, he just is. I've no idea how Tolk would look on stage, but he is a wonderful find for film.

The director Veiko Õunpuu has a good perception of form (i.e. boundary) and, uniting the grotesque and tragic bathos, he manages to include the author's approach to the film as well. In my opinion, the approach is a bit sad, mild and at the same time ironic. The window remains open, and there is air to breathe.

Donald Tomberg (1972) graduated from the Estonian Institute of Humanities in 2003; he is an actor, director and film critic.