On a jaggedly rocky peninsula in Norway, slapped by ocean waves and glowered upon by darkly sprawling clouds, a woman in a simple white dress and sunhat makes her way along a stone path slashed and cracked over centuries by the elements. Not for the first or last time, she carries with her a large muslin sack, and once she reaches the end of the headland, she proceeds to empty its contents — scattering what look to be thousands of pale mineral flecks over the rocks and into the sea. They rattle and bounce, settling into crevices or riding the water, freed into severe environs where their place isn’t immediately clear. In “Trillion,” the latest ravishing study of land, water and living hierarchies from Russian-born docmaker Victor Kossakovsky, the panorama is spectacular, but it doesn’t necessarily contain the big picture.
Who is this woman? What is she doing, and why? Answers to these fundamental points of intrigue are slow to arrive in “Trillion,” which aims to hook its audience instead with mesmeric repetition. Over 79 minutes, we watch her trudge back and forth along this trail, silent and unaccompanied, lugging and spilling one identical sack after another — and if there’s a Sisyphean quality to this arduous, seemingly thankless and perhaps futile task, that’s entirely by design. Sisyphus, after all, was condemned to his eternal, back-breaking labor for trying to alter the gods’ order of life and death on Earth: There’s our first clue as to the meaning behind her mission, though it’s humanity, rather than any higher power, that holds all the cards here.
Those who would prefer to uncover the film’s mysteries at its own pace would be advised to read no further. Only in closing title cards is the identity of its lone figure revealed: K49814, the chosen moniker of a German artist working in the unlikely medium of fish scales. Not applied to canvas or formed into sculpture, the delicate, nail-like flakes are instead collected, transported and returned to the ocean from whence they came.
“Trillion” thus follows the concluding stage of this ecologically minded project (the title refers to the number of fish taken from the waters every year by man) with the sensory lyricism and absence of direct commentary that we’ve come to expect from Kossakovsky’s work. That Hollywood actor and animal rights activist Joaquin Phoenix takes an executive producer credit here — as he did on 2020’s “Gunda,” Kossakovsky’s similarly wordless, black-and-white ode to a farmyard sow — is a telling detail.
“Trillion,” however, is a very different kettle of fish (or sack of scales) from that Neon-distributed festival hit, or indeed from Kossakovsky’s vast environmental studies “Aquarela” and “Architecton” — even as it likewise trades in breathtaking natural spectacle, care of rich, charcoal-textured monochrome lensing by “Gunda” DP Egil Håskjold Larsen and Alexander Dudarev’s dazzling soundscape of wind and water, layered over swelling manmade instruments. Larsen’s camera rarely closes in on its subject, sometimes distantly circling her in ever-grander widescreen swoops, and taking in stray signs of further life in the process: a lighthouse in the background, a trawler ship ominously on the horizon.
For all this formal dynamism, however, the focus on a single cryptic protagonist and her withheld motivation give the film the air of a stylized slow-cinema experiment, albeit with a direct call-to-action message that snaps into place once its nonfiction context is revealed. Some viewers will be frustrated by “Trillion’s” austerity and economy of information, though following a festival run beginning with an IDFA competition premiere, adventurous arthouse distributors are likely to stress its beauty and puzzle-like qualities.
One could argue that this brief feature would make its point as effectively in an even shorter format, but there’s something to be said for making it a kind of endurance test — hardly taxing to watch, given the splendor of its images and aural design, but intended to feel disorienting, even time-stopping, in its lapping to-and-fro rhythms. As such, it’s reflective of the necessarily laborious effort behind the artist’s project, highlighting the disparity between how quickly and casually we take our planet’s resources, and how much longer it takes to put them back — for those who bother at all to do so.
variety.com
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