By Erin Free
Essential Killing opens with the pulsing, strangely hypnotic sound of a chugging helicopter blade, as the camera swoops and glides over the burning sands of a harsh, hot-baked desert. It’s an appropriately surreal, alienating collision of sound and vision that immediately gives cinematic form to one of the most troubling, ambiguous conflicts, well, in the history of the world. It soon becomes clear that the helicopter is hovering over Afghanistan, a war-ripped nation now bound to boast even more negative connotations than Vietnam in the tattered, blood streaked pages of international conflict. Not since Apocalypse Now has a helicopter been used to so forcefully punch home the true strangeness and inhumanity of war. From the opening frames of Essential Killing, it becomes bang-obvious that there is a master behind the camera.
Though hardly prolific (he took a seventeen-year sabbatical from directing in the nineties and through much of the first decade of the new millennium), Jerzy Skolimowski is a Polish writer/actor/director every bit as important to his nation’s cinema as Roman Polanski or Andrzej Wajda. After a series of bold, contentious films in his homeland, Skolimowski made his name internationally with 1967’s The Departure, 1970’s The Adventures Of Gerard, and the cult classic, Deep End. After 1991’s political/personal drama, 30 Door Key, he concentrated on acting and other interests before finally returning to filmmaking with 2008’s dark, perverse drama/thriller, Four Nights With Anna.
Two years later, Skolimowski unleashed Essential Killing on The 2010 Venice Film Festival, where it justifiably became a flashpoint for controversy and audience debate. Not only does the film have as its hero a Taliban fighter, but that Taliban fighter is played by actor/director, Vincent Gallo (Buffalo 66, The Brown Bunny), one of the most divisive figures in modern cinema. In case you were wondering, Essential Killing is not your standard, everyday kind of movie.
After blowing three Americans apart with a rocket launcher, Gallo’s never-named Taliban fighter is quickly captured, and is soon wearing those all-too-familiar orange overalls. Deaf from the rocket blast, he is interrogated and tortured by the US military, but never says a word. Shipped from the scorched surfaces of Afghanistan to the snowy wastes of somewhere in Europe, the Taliban fighter is cuffed with other US enemies in a truck and sent en route to a holding facility. When the truck overturns, however, he is thrown loose, and provided with an opportunity for escape, which he takes by tearing off into the icy uncertainty that lays before him, which at least appears more inviting than the continued torture that awaits him at the hands of the US military. Scourged by the cruelty of the elements, and relentlessly pursued by land and air, the Taliban fighter embarks on a hellish, horrific journey for survival that will involve guns, animal traps, chainsaws, and – in a scene to rival anything cooked up by shock, master John Waters – lactation.
Though the film’s basic plot may make Essential Killing sound like some kind of arthouse aberration of First Blood, it is in fact something far, far different. Gallo’s Taliban fighter is no stoic killing machine – he is a shattered, exhausted, terrified man who doesn’t speak a word throughout the entire course of the film, but instead lets out animal yelps of pain, fear and shock, and finally sobs at what he has become in order to survive. Gallo’s already extraordinary performance is made even more striking because of the fact that he has always been an actor at home with reams of dialogue, with his unconventional high pitched voice nearly as recognisable as his equally unconventional good looks.
While many morons in the critical fraternity accuse Gallo of narcissism because of his infamous filmmaking multitasking, they usually fail to see that he is also one of the most exquisitely vulnerable actors of the modern era; Gallo will lay it out on screen with a complete lack of vanity, and a willing readiness to avoid the machismo of so many of his peers. His performance in Essential Killing – anguished, desperate, fearful, weak, strong, dangerous, hopeless – is nothing short of a wordless tour de force. “It’s phenomenal,” Skolimowski said of his leading man’s performance to Electric Sheep. “I cannot imagine anybody else being better in that role. It’s really an Academy Award performance.” Though he’ll likely never touch Oscar gold, Gallo did deservedly get the Best Actor gong at The Venice Film Festival.
With the mesmeric Vincent Gallo at its swirling centre, and the stark cinematography of Adam Sikora driving its often blinding imagery, Essential Killing is a stunning film. Its never-stated politics buried ambiguously beneath the straight simplicity of its plotting, Skolimowski’s lean, economic, poetically constructed “action thriller” ultimately cuts free of its contemporaneous shackles and stands as something far more lasting than political storytelling – Essential Killing is, quite simply, an existential treatise on man’s struggle with himself and the violent, vicious, unforgiving world around him.
