TRUE LOVE (TOSI RAKKAUS) SCRIPT DRAFT
by Ekaterina Zhuzhleva (katekuler)
Opening scene.
Caption: 1. WHO ARE YOU? [Handwritten white text on black background.]
From here on, all action takes place within frames one way or another — split screens, maps, pages, etc. — but never simply on an open screen.
For the interview scene with a person, the video format is square.
The camera movement is handheld, as if someone is holding a camcorder; the image drifts in and out of focus. I'm sitting inside the frame, medium shot, hands clasped together, jittering nervously.
- Umm… Who am I? *pause* My name is _____ (bleep)
Long pause, awkwardness — I look at my hands, fold them together, twirl my thumbs.
- I am _____(bleep)… No, Finnish? No, but I live in Finland, you know?
A browser-like window pops up over the main image. [These windows will keep appearing throughout, displaying elements of the monologue, symbols, or objects.] There are images referring to immigration and the fear of crossing borders.
- I am also white. No, Slavic? I don't know actually, my grand-grandparents burned all the documents.
- I am a girl. You know what, I don't really know this either. Feminine clothes feel unsettling on me. Like they're eating me up.
After this the monochrome body dissection sequence starts, with images referring to anatomy books, but with metaphoric meanings.
- Shit, do I even belong anywhere at all?
UNSETTLING VOICE: Of course you belong!
Sequence with birth, metamorphic, children turn into cannon balls used for destruction
Dissection of a feminine body, Da Vinci style, like Orthodox iconography, with numbers and their definitions (multiple frames on one screen):
ASSIGNED AT BIRTH:
CHILDBIRTH
POWER
RAPE
WAR
SUBMISSION
POLICE
SURVEILLANCE
BORDERS
SERVITUDE
[References: Tarot + anatomy books + technical drawings + artist Varya Yakovleva]
Toilet signs and two bodies, Adam and Eve beneath the toilet signs;
again a Da Vinci-style human, Tarot signs, an anatomical human, Orthodox-style icons of humans, showing different ways we interpret humans and human bodies through culture.
Abstract animation of how there are only two extremes, only black and white, two dots that are unconnected, existing simultaneously as the only options — a metamorphic sequence bringing everything together, mostly black and white, computer frame-by-frame animation.
Abrupt stop.
We see a mushroom growing, like a time-lapse, discrete/stop-motion style animation, black background.
Sudden pause.
The caption appears on screen again: 2. WHO ARE YOU?
Pause, black screen. No answer. A distinct wooden cutting-board sound begins in the hollow silence.
A small frame within the whole frame: hands cutting a mushroom on a cutting board, then the cut mushrooms are placed into soup with the knife.
Slowly transforming into iconographic framing, mushrooms are cut in halves and pieces, seemingly mutilated by human touch.
Attempts to dissect the mushroom in different ways, split screens with different stages of their growth, like in Larionov's "Seasons." The mushroom type keeps changing, morphing into something else, resisting dissection. Once cut, the mushrooms turn into ghosts or melt away, leaving no trace. New mushrooms constantly emerge and grow, whole and un-dissectable.
Every time a mushroom is cut at the ground, a few new ones pop up. They seem like a hydra, growing new heads in place of the one that was cut. The screen division shifts, the camera slowly moves down, uncovering the underground, where we see the rhizome connecting everything. We observe a wider angle of the landscape in a skewed perspective, like in Persian miniatures (+Brecht Evens?), where everything connects in a pattern-like way — decorative, without perspective, more like something out of a biology textbook or a technical drawing, presented as a diagram.
As we follow the rhizome, we discover humans in a cave looking at their own shadows (reference to Plato's Cave), while everything else is colorful — the humans have a limited color palette. Humans dissect humans in different ways, trying to systematize themselves. Humans play with a construction set and blocks, building towers and buildings that collapse (a Tower of Babel analogy).
Reverbed godly voice: WRONG QUESTION
3. HOW DO I KNOW YOU?
Here: moon rabbits leaping over hills, moons, planets, and mushrooms.
Everything connects with everything else, an idyllic utopia with all of nature interlinked, idyllic landscapes and endless visual connections like in technical drawings or anatomy books. Constant references to anatomy and gore — everything is dissected, exposing its insides, and reconnected into a whole in a circle. All the insides are alive and pulsing, blood runs through everyone's veins, everything is sensual and alive — meaning everything around is connected and vulnerable.
Black screen, a human figure points toward the mushroom figure (Michelangelo's Creation of Adam). A star appears at their point of connection, coloring the human in more shades (= the mushroom mind brings color).
4. HOW DO I KNOW MYSELF?
A human figure being stripped of clothes, skin, and bones, until only nerves remain. The nerves morph into a rhizome, images of hands connecting, humans with many heads and limbs, metamorphic imagery of merging into one another, a chaotic, distorted, rotating Da Vinci human-mushroom hermaphrodite. One human merges into the mushroom, another merges into other humans, and they are all connected to many more.
An idyllic, picturesque landscape of every type of human, animal, and mushroom, Eden-like, existing together.
Reverbed godly voice: WRONG QUESTION
The room again, and again the character from the beginning.
HOW DO I LOVE ____________ LONG BLEEP
Ending title: YOU ARE EVERYTHING, AND EVERYTHING IS YOU