Lost Holiday @ SILVERDOCS
At the outset of Lost Holiday, a charming, funny, and almost unintentionally political documentary out of the Czech Republic, director Lucie Králová rather cheekily declares the film, via the opening credits, to be a "detective documentary." It's a touch that borders on precious, and a tone that continues in the often wry intertitles that mark time throughout the "investigation" that is the film's subject. What they're trying to detect are the identities of six men who they know only through photographs. A man that Králová meets through an art project in which she was involved happened upon a suitcase in a dumpster in a run-down neighborhood near Sweden's Göteberg airport. Inside there was nothing but a plastic bag containing 22 rolls of undeveloped film. He had them processed, and found himself with over 700 photos of six Asian men on what appeared to be a holiday throughout Scandinavia. What Králová wanted to know is if it's possible, in the interconnected world we now live in, to track down these men based solely on what they can glean from their photographs.
With this wholly unique premise intact, the film is off and running. They begin by consulting Asians living in Prague to see if they can get a handle on the nationality of the men. Everyone has an opinion, most of the opinions are the same, but what is fascinating are the explanations people give for why they think the men are from a particular country or region, and why they couldn't possibly be from certain other places. Despite it's oddball foundation and the constant winks and nods, the undercurrent of subtle social commentary is established early on.
Králová and her crew continue their investigation, traveling to the same places the men do, often taking pictures of themselves in the same spots, or holding up their pictures in front of the empty landscape before dropping them to show the identical backdrop, sans Asian tourist, in front of their own lens. As the film progresses, we begin to feel part of the team, and we pull for them and feel their disappointment at every dead end, every police officer or government worker who declares their cause hopeless. They periodically return to scenes from Prague, where they've set up the pictures as a gallery installation that seems to be a fairly popular attraction; each visitor speculates, reasons, and postulates as to who these men are. Everyone loves the chance to play Sherlock Holmes, deducing facts about the men based on the smallest details in the photos. Everyone, interestingly, also loves having their own picture taken in front of the life size image of these strangers.
Dead end after dead end turns out to only be an obstacle rather than a barrier, but each time back on the hunt the trail seems to turn colder and colder. Luckily, like most any trip worth taking, the journey is often more important than the destination. Králová structures her film so that it doesn't really matter if they find the men in the end. We will tell you this: there are surprises and twists in the final act, but whether that involves finding the men or not, we can't say. Lost Holiday is such a gem of clever pleasures that it could end satisfyingly even in an anticlimax.
It's rare to see points made so effortlessly and subtly in a documentary. Maybe we're too used to American documentary making, much of which, in the higher profile features, has turned into strident political polemic. Which has its place, but after all that heavy finger shaking, a light touch taken in making no less important observations is a breath of fresh air. Lost Holiday has a lot to say beyond just the thrill of the chase: about how we view cultures that are "other" to us, about the conclusions we reach without even knowing it based on the smallest of visual cues, about living in a world that is growing smaller at exponential rates. As the filmmakers are stonewalled again and again by Chinese state television in their efforts to get the images of these men broadcast in China, the film begins to move into commentary about societies that do so much to close themselves off from the rest of the shrinking globe.
As it reaches its conclusion, not only does the plot take an interesting and unexpected twist, but so does the tone and the focus -- such a left turn that it seems that even the filmmakers are surprised at the realizations their film is coming to. As they reach the end (for better or worse) of their search, there are still many questions left unanswered, and a lot of thoughts left to sort through. Whether they found what they were looking for or not, what they did manage to uncover was the secret to making an enormously thought-provoking film that is still laugh-out-loud funny.
Lost Holiday screens again tonight at 10:30 p.m. at the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival.