The Temptation of St. Tony (Püha Tõnu kiusamine) (2009)

Celebrating 20 years of bold and fabulous auteur cinema by Homeless Bob Productions. We will continue our retrospective with the sophomore feature by Veiko Õunpuu.

Veiko Õunpuu’s second feature film, after his acclaimed Autumn Ball, is a parable on the new, wolf-like capitalism in Eastern Europe with its compassionless capitalist rules and rulers. Shot in beautiful black-and-white, Õunpuu’s vision is provocative and dark, but also very diverting with his use of black comedy (not unlike Roy Andersson) and nightmarish metaphors.

As starting point it takes a quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy: ‘Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark.’ Tony, a moderately prosperous middle manager in his forties, starts to doubt his way of life and his morality after his father’s burial. He sees the forest darken around him….

Bizarre events start to take place on his uncharted journey towards a clearer conscience and he becomes unhinged from reality. Trying to bury a dog he ran into with his luxury car on the muddy back roads of Estonia, Tony finds severed hands in the woods. When he tries to report this, the police start to investigate him. He witnesses his wife’s infidelity, fires his employees, meets a soon-to-be kidnapped angelic Russian girl. And, it seems, he starts to lose everything that was so firmly his: his family, his job, and finally, himself.