Valley of the Gods: Lush Film from Polish Director Majewski Earns Amazement, Not Admiration.
By Liam Lacey
Rating: D
Old-fashioned Euro cinema meets Navajo mythology, wrestles with it in the dirt, and soils itself in Valley of the Gods, a visually lush and enigmatic film from Polish director Lech Majewski that earns amazement if not admiration.
Inspired, apparently, by a desire to say something about the contrast between wealth and poverty, it is set in various European cities for its palatial interiors, and the fantastic rock formations in southeast Utah. The film unfolds in 10 cryptically titled chapters (Flight, Love Rock) and three overlapping storylines. Possibly, peyote was involved.
The first story is about an unhappily divorced writer named John Ecas, played a furrow-browed Josh Hartnett. He arrives in the Valley of the God, pulls an antique desk out of his SUV trunk, sets it up on the roadside and begins writing in long-hand. This eccentric behaviour is apparently his traumatized response to his wife ditching him for her hang-gliding instructor.
In a subsequent scene, John’s therapist (John Rhys-Davies) suggests that John should confront the absurdity of the world by doing absurd things. That includes walking blindfolded backward down a bus street and climbing a rock face with the cans and pots that trailed behind his “Just Married” wedding car, tied to his legs. A second storyline concerns the world’s richest man, named Wes Tauros (John Malkovich) who wants John to write his biography.
Wes, dressed in a long monastic leather coat with a hood, likes to roam the streets at night scavenging food, and gets into fights with homeless people, before passing through a brick wall, into his Dracula-like castle high atop a mountain.
There he has a garden filled with plaster figures, and sleeps with different women who look like his dead wife. One of them is the named Karen (Bérénice Marlohe). When she tells Tauros’ creepy butler (Keir Dullea) that she’s not in the mood for an encounter, he responds: “You know ‘mood’ is ‘doom’ spelled backwards.”
I wish she’d answered, “Wow. Do you know that’s spelled the same backwards and forwards?”
A third story follows a group of Navajo, including a grandfatherly figure known as Third Eye (Joseph Runningfox), a shamanistic figure who makes strange pronouncements. One of his fellow Navajo has sex with a rock and later. Third Eye extracts a baby out of the ground. What actually happens within the film and what are John’s writerly inventions is never clear.
I suspect that John is the author of the scene where a vengeful giant baby lumbers down from the crumbling mountains to stomp his way through Los Angeles, destroying buildings. He may have something to do with the Navajo creation myth alluded to at the beginning of the film. Or perhaps he’s a cousin of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.
Valley of the Gods. Written and directed by Lech Majewski. Starring Josh Hartnett, Bérénice Marlohe, and John Malkovich. Available now on BluRay, DVD, digital and VOD.