There are few cases where an experimental short film defying pre-established categories can capture with such a visionary force a recognizable universe that is so overwhelming through its explosive vitalism. Halfway between poetic confession and pseudo-documentary, ‘Solastalgia‘ is a eulogy for the incredible power and beauty of nature, which overflows a vibrant energy that protects and destroys with the same intensity. Faithful to a contemplative cinema, which feeds from the chromatic and structural perfection of the images that capture the metamorphoses of the nature mechanism around us, Pascal Tremblay and Sean Stiller give us through this fascinating project a rapid incursion through subtle chemistry that maintains the energy balance between emotional fluctuations of the individual and the outbursts of the cosmic elements.
It is hard to say, therefore, if this short film is a visual love poem that uses as a pretext the whims of the unleashed nature or a symphony of colours and seemingly random feelings by which nature itself becomes through the objective of the camera an individual with an independent existence. Perhaps the intention of the two directors is to simultaneously capture these two coordinates, since their sensitivity which filters the countless faces of the environment governed by inexplicable forces is somewhat approaching the poeticism of Terrence Malick’s films where, as in this case, the director’s eye can discern no difference between the human love and suffering and the cosmic serenity and agony that give birth to the solar systems or kill the dying stars.
Thus, as the title itself suggests, this short film depicts with a photographer’s fine-grained chromatic sense and a poet’s volcanic sensitivity the interdependence between the mechanisms of human sentiments and climatic transitions, providing viewers an intense experience that, with the help of a narrator’s voice touched by the thrill of love or by the imminence of suffering, triggers a wide range of divergent emotions. Pascal Tremblay and Sean Stiller therefore succeed in communicating sincerely and intensely through a subtle discourse that exceeds the epic exigencies of a conventional film, giving us a varied panorama of the human soul seen as a pure manifestation of the nature’s forces around us. Not by accident, ‘Solastalgia’ is an experimental short film that impresses with its overwhelming vitality, in which the surrounding nature and human nature become the avatars of the same cosmic soul.
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