Ruben Brandt, Collector forges an artsy, cinematic self-consciousness

Movie Review: Ruben Brandt: Collector

Packed with masterworks from fine art and movie history, Slovenian filmmaker Milorad Krstic’s animated heist story features a psychotherapist suffering from night terrors and a gang of oddball patients. It’s colourful and kinetic, but is it art, or an exercise in self-conceit?

Ruben Brandt, Collector

3/5

Starring: Ivan Kamaras, Csaba Marton, Gabriella Hamori, Katalin Dombi

Directed by: Milorad Krstic

Running time: 1 hr 34 mins

Rating: Parental Guidance

In Hungarian and English

By Katherine Monk

Many things are labelled art. Yet often, it’s hard to tell if it’s a piece of honest, creative and skilled expression, or just a giant wank.

So you have to go with your gut. Perhaps, enough souls will agree it’s a “masterpiece” that it survives into history — hanging on some wall, legitimized by the focused eyes of the passing masses and market-savvy dealers, curators and wealthy collectors. Or not. It could disappear into the dustbin of time, loved by too few to matter.

My gut tells me Ruben Brandt, Collector may be the latter. Though steeped in a deep knowledge of art history, and brimming with visual references to the so-called masters, Milorad Krstic’s animated heist movie is undeniably ‘arty,’ but it doesn’t feel like ‘art.’

At least to me, for it inspired no real emotional response. Instead, it felt more like a mind game for art geeks. Even the name is a playful nod to Rubens and Rembrandt. Cranking things up a notch for those who use the adjective “meta” in regular conversation, our central character is a psychotherapist. And for those who feel no connection to fine art or semiotics, the whole film is a  self-aware homage to cinema — referencing everyone from Alfred Hitchcock and Luis Bunuel to Akira Kurosawa to Stanley Kubrick.

Though steeped in a deep knowledge of art history, and brimming with visual references to the so-called masters, Milorad Krstic’s animated heist movie is undeniably ‘arty,’ but it doesn’t feel like ‘art.’

It’s a veritable culture collage that sticks half of Western history onto a shared canvas. Yet, even with all these familiar bits and pieces, the assembly doesn’t capture the essence of anything we readily recognize because Krstic is seeing it through a different lens.

Described as a “Middle European artist born in Dorberk, Slovenia in 1952,” Krstic spent his formative years in Slovenia, Serbia and now, Hungary. His aesthetic sensibilities slant to the Eastern side of Continental. They also, not surprisingly, pay homage to his famous predecessors such as Oscar-winner Zbigniew Rybczynski’s Tango (1981) and Gyorgy Kovasznai’s Nights in the Boulevard (1972). The images are flattened and abstracted, as well as highly stylized. The faces are cartoons with a hint of Ukrainian Easter egg, and the subject matter echoes the “intellectual caricature” films of 1970s Hungary — as described in Anna Isa Orosz’s paper in The Calvert Journal. The eastern european tradition of animation tends to focus on  “dark, pessimistic humour, anti-heroism, the absurdity of human existence.”

Gyorgy Kovasznai’s Nights in the Boulevard Ruben Brandt animation Hungarian

Gyorgy Kovasznai’s Nights in the Boulevard (1972) seems to be a source of visual inspiration. 

All this fun stuff has to compete with the other layers of visual content, and their intrinsic meaning, which results in a somewhat incomprehensible scramble of ideas pulled together by a problematic protagonist in Ruben Brandt.

Ruben Brandt has learned to help others, but he can’t help himself. He suffers from horrible nightmares that he believes can only be relieved by stealing great works of art. It’s a shaky premise, but who doesn’t like a heist movie?

Ruben Brandt has learned to help others, but he can’t help himself. He suffers from horrible nightmares that he believes can only be relieved by stealing great works of art. It’s a shaky premise, but who doesn’t like a heist movie?

Using a team of his own patients — each with their own particular talent — he starts his illicit collection. The Louvre, Tate and Hermitage, become his playground as he and his crew crate Manet’s Olympia, Winslow Homer’s Nighthawks and Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus. He needs to collect all 13 images that torture his dreams, but it’s not long before a detective named Kowalski is on his trail, and a mysterious woman named Mimi makes suggestive advances.

Though clearly looking to be an action-packed art thriller for adults, Ruben Brandt, Collector lands on the Saturday Morning cartoon side of the spectrum. It’s hyperkinetic and colourful, yet without interesting dialogue or fully realized characters — something that tickles the eyeballs, but doesn’t do much of anything behind the optic nerve.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, March 7, 2019

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Review: Ruben Brandt, Collector

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Summary

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Though steeped in a deep knowledge of art history, and brimming with visual references to the so-called masters, Milorad Krstic’s animated heist movie is undeniably ‘arty,’ but it doesn’t feel like ‘art.’ At least to me, for it inspired no real emotional response. Instead, it felt more like a mind game for art geeks. -- Katherine Monk

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