Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus, a feature-length animated hallucination by independent Croatian filmmaker Dalibor Barić, is a fictional narrative film to the same degree that Joan Miró's The Hunter (1924) is a landscape painting. It embraces the expressive power of experimental animation fully, almost feverishly, taking the viewer on a merry-go-round of techniques and styles. Rotoscoped imagery intercuts with vintage comic book collages. Found footage transitions into drawn abstractions and back again. Solarized frames, oil painting effects, and scanned pages of old books blur in a deliciously undecipherable surrealist manifesto.
What does it all mean? Throughout its 81-minute runtime, the film remains unconcerned with—and at times is indeed gleefully resistant to—narrative clarity. The story is mere scaffolding for a kaleidoscope of pensive, eerily compelling mixed-media segments informed by science fiction, Cronenbergian horror, pulpy noir, and Andrei Tarkovskii's existential ruminations. A man and a woman are on the run from an oppressive government. An inspector is hot on their trail. Time travel is involved (or is it?) Character motivations remain ambiguous, as do plot developments. These separate textual and visual elements are all masterfully composed (and/or composited), but their meaning and the links in between remain stubbornly enigmatic even upon repeat viewings.
Despite the absence of a straightforward narrative, the film's eccentric, dryly comical script is one of its strongest points. Barić's philosophical musings, non sequiturs, and deadpan humor come together into a genuinely amusing, occasionally profound, and surprising contemplation of topics such as the future, identity, alienation, and persecution. The results are oddly quotable—a rarity for a piece so relentlessly experimental. Seemingly, throwaway one-liners such as “the future is an abandoned construction site, cancelled due to lack of funds” are likely to resonate, especially in the present pandemic moment.
Accidental Luxuriance is directed, written, animated, and scored by Barić. This could have easily doomed the feature as a creative ego trip, but the Croatian artist remains self-assured throughout without becoming self-indulgent. In fact, the skillful intermingling of visual styles and techniques is infused with a degree of playfulness that offsets the complexity of the animation and the dynamic speed of the editing. This element of play is evident in the title itself, which turns out to be surprisingly apt despite (or perhaps because of) its apparent randomness. The film actually is a rebus—a puzzle presenting concepts through inventive combinations of word and image. It is certainly both translucent and watery in its elusiveness, elliptical storytelling, and ever-morphing animated shapes that flow into each other both between and within frames. It is only the luxuriance that turns out to be decidedly not accidental.
I recommend this film highly, if not widely. This is experimental animation at its most unbridled, challenging, infuriating, and mesmerizing. For audiences unaccustomed to such an unapologetic, almost taunting embrace of the medium's avant-garde potential, this film may prove a tedious chore. For the adventurous viewer, however, it is a tantalizing provocation that both demands and rewards puzzling over.
