The Carpathian Mushroom (1990) Le champignon des Carpathes

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The Carpathian Mushroom (1990) Le champignon des Carpathes

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In its current form an irradiated specimen if there ever was one: colors warped sickly yellow and pink and seeping into each other like radium into soil. “Once upon a time…after Chernobyl.” Surely Biette intended otherwise, but years of VHS damage only serve to heighten this emergency Hamlet, where Ophelia dies in a hospital bed from radioactive poisoning as the theater is buried in imperceptible ash. “Dust is a part of the theater,” though, and Biette understands better than anyone how these low rent, black box productions feel: despite the apocalypse event, I recognize the petty tensions, the boredom, and the emptiness, of course. No one seems to attend the plays in Biette (though, admittedly, we English speakers are working with a limited dataset) and that is, perhaps unsurprisingly, where the melancholy creeps in: who is the stage for these days, anyway, especially when we’re all choking on modernity’s fallout?

The magic mushroom of the title promises a new age cure-all that never really materializes, though the theater still allows for an occasional remedy amidst general sickness: a father-daughter relationship, embittered after the old metteur en scène abandoned his wife on her deathbed years earlier, is briefly salvaged by Shakespeare. Biette has a wonderful way of detonating these small bits of character, which arrive from nowhere and suddenly make his strange games blossom with emotion (I’m still haunted by the casual reveal that somnolent, put-upon Sonia Saviange in Le théâtre des matières carries the secret honor of a French Resistance fighter). And really, the old director was simply afraid of the hospital's plastic sterility and of the final curtain call. Not a bad guy, just one hopelessly seeking refuge in a black box. And who, on this ridiculous website, doesn’t prefer the comfort of their little dominion of dust? Biette is for you.

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The Carpathian Mushroom (1990) Le champignon des Carpathes

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