Feature film Blue blood (2023) constructs two parallel stories about equally unhappy people in the same family. Diana (Ilze Ķuzule-Skrastiņa) lives with her husband Igor (Egons Dombrovskis), with whom the relationship has long since evaporated, just like love, property, money and electricity in their shared apartment. Her brother Edward (Tom Velichko) is planning a wedding with someone he doesn’t love. Although it may seem that these two characters are united only by blood, something more pulsates in their minds – “blue blood”, which forces them to accept the kind of life that society supposedly expects from them.
Emotion darts
The events of the film lead the viewer through the artery of cruelty and patience, in which the pressure is maintained by the characters themselves. It is a toxic and, paradoxically, static odyssey, in which the main characters do not go, but exist. The traveler is only a spectator who is destined to see how the capillaries of the characters’ real lives are choked with a stereotype, the burden of needs and necessities that no one can express. The result is fatal – the aorta of the full-blooded being bursts, and the person dies. Even though we still see him physically on the screen, he is gone. There is only a framework that continues to claw at what is left.
The director Una Celma masterfully realized this feeling of the inevitable end in the creative tandem with the cameraman Aleksandras Grebneva. The camera, without taking its gaze, here approaches, here again moves away from the actors, simultaneously achieving a disturbing effect of presence. Actors are given such a game space in which the characters’ relationships can be freely escalated with their energy and play, allowing electrified darts of emotions to flash on the screen. This principle of Alexander Grebnev’s moving and mobile camera is really suitable for the film. It accentuates the feeling that nothing can be hidden, even if the main characters try at all costs to convince themselves that they can and should.
The work of the actors Ilze Ķuzules-Skrastiņa, Egon Dombrovskis, Esmeraldas Ermales and other professionals in the shot is able to catalyze the film’s story to the point where the room becomes a black box, a stage and prop setting, in which the only thing that still exists is a person and his miserable relationship. held together by the mere duty or selfish inclination to manipulate and exploit another. Even more: things that seem to have so much value become anonymous and insignificant, the artificiality and inauthenticity of these relationships also come to the fore, which forces the characters to return to each other again and again, because they have nothing else at all.
Once discovered
Director Una Celma devotes quite a bit of screen time to this game of actors and movie props. It seems that the suitcase stretched across the city, pushed into Diana’s hands by her mother, becomes an image that symbolizes all the things and relationships that the characters carry with them, waiting for them to finally have some value. Igor, who is constantly looking for something at home to bring capital to another card game, sees value in these things only insofar as they can satisfy his gambling addiction.
These things are just junk that creates a desired facade for the characters’ lives. In reality, they live in a dollhouse-like arrangement, or at least make others believe that they do. The sofa and the paintings are there because everyone thinks they belong in a dollhouse. They live in spacious apartments (or pretend to live in them) with long corridors, high ceilings and large tables where people don’t sit or eat together. Creating such an image may even seem like a quite convenient solution to others, but in the long run it is not suitable for living. That is why the living space of the characters evokes the feeling of a prosperous and luxurious proscenium, but this illusion only reinforces the senselessness of their plastic relationship.
At one point in the film, Egon Dombrovsky’s character, Igor, eats the soup that his lover has made for him and says: “Understand, I’m not ready yet…” And he’s not lying. Igor is clearly aware of the truth of these words, and perhaps at least once he is open to himself and others. In this sentence, he prophetically expresses the inability of all the characters in the film to face the usual discomfort of their lives in order to live differently.
