Frail Hungry Fingers
Alina Gheorghe's "Glass Fingers", is probably the most successful animation of its kind in recent years in Romania.
In an immense palace built from transparencies, statues watch over the empty room. The bathtub in the ballroom shelters a female body that rips organic matter from itself, which is transformed into tentacular, electric plasma that disappears on the liquid glass floor as if through the shallow edges of the sea. One and the same with water, with matter, with liquid light.
Alina Gheorghe's "Glass Fingers", is probably the most successful animation of its kind in recent years in Romania. The film has made its way flawlessly through Europe's biggest animation festivals such as Annecy, Anima Brussels, it found a place in the Sarajevo Film Festival competition, and was awarded a special mention at Anim'est in Bucharest.
"Let the poor eat their own offspring," suggested Johathan Swift in "A Modest Proposal", a hyperbolic satire attacking the hostile attitudes of Protestants towards Irish proletarians in the eighteenth century. "Glass Fingers" doesn't make such a directly political statement, but the elements it plays with are admirably serious: the tearing of flesh, the raw, contorted aesthetics of the body's physiognomy (borrowed seamlessly from Egon Schiele), the mirror-plate, lead beyond the aesthetic.
Alina Gheorghe graciously captures an aspect that the distracted eye could easily miss. Without engaging in interpretation for the sake of interpretation, I think we can speculate on the subtextual link between the various instances depicting the female figure and the body's relationship with food; or rather with starvation, body dysmorphia or, in short, anorexia!
The beauty of "Glass Fingers" lies precisely in this double nature. Its authors have understood that there is no aesthetics for aesthetics' sake. Therefore, without thematically overburdening the entire film, the director executes a supple, triple-jump-on-ice type movement and closes the narrative with dignity.
This week's premiere: Glass Fingers by Emil Vasilache, Thursday, October 30th, at 9:00 p.m EEST, on CINEPUB.RO
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