Sorgoi Prakov: The Atrocity Exhibition

So last week I had a skillfully executed mockumentary that never reached the level of intensity that it could have, and I guess by way of contrast, this week I ended up watching a found-footage film that makes a number of mistakes and probably ends up being a little too intense for its own good. I swear I didn’t plan it that way.

Well, that might be a little too glib of a comparison to make - Sorgoi Prakov isn’t exactly found-footage (well, at least it’s framed in a way that beggars belief on that front), but it’s definitely a first-person perspective on one man’s spiral toward rock bottom and whatever lies beyond that. It has its moments though, even if it suffers from poor narrative and pacing choices.

We open cold on what purports to be footage that is labeled property of French law enforcement. It’s footage of a filthy, near-feral man (who for some reason has a video camera strapped to his head) assaulting a family in their home. This cuts to a title card explaining that this is the footage shot by one Sorgoi Prakov, documenting his “descent into darkness.” I really hate it when found-footage films do this. Don’t tell us up front that something bad is going to happen, just let the damn story play out in a way that we aren’t braced to expect. And if that wasn’t annoying enough, that title card is followed by opening credits that are intended to be those of the fictional producers of a documentary titled “My European Dream.” And then if that wasn’t enough, that title card morphs into a scary version (skulls and all) with the title “My European Nightmare.” It’s a jarring combination of artifice and verisimilitude, and it does nothing to help the movie.

With that particular grab-bag of filmic cliches out of the way, we are introduced to Sorgoi Prakov. He’s from a small (fictional) Eastern European country, where he works as a cameraman for the state television service. He’s come to Paris as the starting point for a journey that will see him visiting every capital in Western Europe (on a route shaped like a giant heart), as he documents his travels in search of the “European Dream.” Hence the title. It is strictly a one-man operation - he has two small video cameras, one directional microphone, and a laptop for editing and uploading his video to a streaming video site. One camera and the mic are mounted on a rig that he wears on his head, the camera on one side of his head and the microphone on the other. He has the other camera attached to a Steadicam rig that he also wears, so he can capture footage of what he sees as well as footage of him seeing it. It’s almost tempting to call it a parody of the ridiculous lengths some found-footage films go to in order to try and rationalize having footage that is too neat and tidy to come from a hand-held camera, but here it works to make Sorgoi stand out like a sore thumb. He looks more than a little ridiculous as he walks the streets of Paris, occasionally conducting man-on-the-street interviews.

So we have someone from a small Eastern European country come to the big city to make a documentary. We have seen this before, and though it would be reductive to call this “Borat if it were a horror film,” there is definitely a bit of that flavor to it. Sorgoi is presented very much as a naif, a fool, a man entirely out of his depth in Paris. He's come here to make a documentary about the "European dream," but it becomes apparent very quickly that he doesn't have much of a plan. Mostly he makes attempts to visit tourist destinations and gets waylaid almost immediately by the more predatory side of Paris' nightlife. Like any big city, it's going to eat up people who aren't looking out for themselves.

And that's exactly what happens. Sorgoi gets too drunk, gets too high, and loses his credit card. His producers aren't returning his calls. And so after maybe two days in Paris, he’s already down to the cash in his wallet.

Like I said, he didn’t have much of a plan.

From there, it's just a matter of time before the money runs out and his circumstances become increasingly and inexorably more desperate. He's a long way from home, doesn't know the language, doesn't know the culture, doesn't know the city, he's utterly at the mercy of others and it's in this that the film is at its most effective. There are multiple points where it's clear to the viewer that things are about to go very badly, while Sorgoi himself seems blithely unaware. He’s an obvious foreigner roaming the streets of Paris with a bunch of electronics strapped to him like some kind of performance artist or clown. His situation is precarious to begin with, and every new setback, every bad decision, every time circumstances don't break his way, it gets even worse. There's a steadily mounting dread there, a question of how much worse it's going to get before it's all over.

The answer is much, much worse. Sorgoi is a largely sympathetic (if not pathetic) figure at first, and his footage rapidly devolves into a series of victimizations, self-destructive behavior, and evidence of his declining fortunes and increasing debasement. And for the first half or so of the film, it works really well - we’re watching an apparently well-intentioned (if not especially well-prepared) man on a slide toward rock bottom. After a couple of attempted muggings and one delirious night out, full of too much vodka and too many pills, Sorgoi’s composure begins to falter as he realizes how quickly he’s running out of options. It’s hard to watch because it’s a situation that isn’t entirely outside of what we can imagine. There are no monsters here, just a man stranded far from home with no way to get back and nowhere to sleep. His attempts to put a brave face on all of it just makes it that much harder, though he isn’t by any means perfect - he’s maybe a bit of a pig, and he does stupid, foolish things when he’s drunk, which becomes more and more frequent the worse things become. I don’t know that you can say anyone deserves what’s happening to him, but you can also see why it’s happening to him.

And then, at what seems to be the tipping point, when you think he's hit absolute rock bottom, there is the suggestion (deftly underplayed, I think) that maybe he wasn't that stable to begin with. That maybe his trip to Paris wasn't for the purposes of an officially sanctioned documentary. And what follows is someone who plunges completely into the abyss, someone who finds rock bottom and keeps digging. In some ways it's communicated effectively, with the footage we're watching become increasingly more fragmented, as a reflection of his rapidly disintegrating mental state, ultimately breaking down into frequent blackouts, electronic buzzing, and a signal so glitchy that it dissolves into noise. In that sense it's effective, but the back half of the movie exchanges a slow, desperate decline for a constant barrage of grotesquery that eventually becomes numbing. Individual sequences are striking in isolation, but there's just so much of it and it gets so horrible, and Sorgoi is so visibly losing what humanity he has left that it's harder to care than it is in the beginning, when, despite his naivete and ineptitude and occasional boorishness, he was still recognizable as a person caught in increasingly worsening circumstances. His transformation into something more feral feels believable in relation to who he was before, it isn't jarring, but the way it plays out threatens to turn the character into a more generically monstrous figure. We're just sort of left to watch things get worse and worse and worse, and it’s so relentless and there’s so little breathing room, so few reminders of Sorgoi’s humanity, that it's hard to feel much about it one way or the other.

It's not that there’s much wrong with the way it develops, and fortunately for every deeply unpleasant thing we're forced to watch, there are two even more unpleasant things left to suggestion, but there’s just so much of it that it kind of loses any meaning. There isn't enough connection between the Sorgoi we knew and what he's become, either, so apart from watching the obvious physical and mental decline of this character, we're left with kind of a generic maniac, and though what that maniac gets up to is extremely upsetting, there isn't the horror we'd feel at what this man has become, because there's nothing left of him at the end.

And maybe that's kind of the point, but as it is, it just sort of becomes a series of atrocities that go on and on until they stop. So yeah, it’s sort of like Borat, but Borat by way of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. And if that seems like kind of a queasy combination, well...yep.

IMDB entry
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