Several years ago, Bulgarian director Ivalyo Hristov was having a night out with some friends when a remarkable thing occurred, like a scene from a movie. On the road across from where he sat, a van full of refugees were pulled over and arrested. Lit up by the headlights of several police cars, he witnessed as a group of sweaty-faced men and burqa-clad women, their wide-eyed children crouched down low, were all dragged out and rounded up and sent away for processing. Hristov was later ashamed to recall how his initial startled reaction to the event was neither sympathy for the strangers’ sorry plight nor a desire to intervene, but merely a gut-level, adrenalized fear. In order to overcome and perhaps atone for this base emotion (and to inspire in his audience the desire to do the same), he wrote and directed Fear (original Bulgarian title: Strah), an affecting satire about the difficulties inherent in overcoming one’s fear of the other, and of the consequences that follow if you do. Initially released in 2020, there could not be a more fitting moment for its message to be expanded globally.
Svetla (Svetlana Yancheva), a middle-aged out-of-work school teacher, face scored deep with worry, tends to the grave of her long-dead husband. Since he’s been gone, she’s been afraid of life, of connection, of the dark. The knife kept beneath her pillow and her lacerating tongue are scant protection against her many imagined monsters. Her hair could use a good washing, and her clothes a bit of love and care. The remote village in which she lives, on the mud-splattered plains bordering Turkey, has certainly seen better days as well. The school’s been shuttered due to lack of children, and the locals who remain seem stuck in some half-asleep state of wandering about, waiting for who-knows-what to come shake them from their stupor.
Out hunting in the forest for food one cold evening (the unemployment benefits are meager, and who knows when the next job will come), Svetla encounters Bamba (Michael Flemming), a Malian refugee who is attempting to make his way to Germany on foot. Marching him back to her garden shed at riflepoint, Svetla has no intention of trying to connect with him – even if they could speak the same language, it’s clear that the sudden appearance of this black man in her midst confirms at once her many fears about the chaos lurking beyond her walls.
The dark comedy of errors that results from this encounter is not entirely one that surprises in any substantial manner. As circumstances conspire to keep Bamba and Svetla together (it turns out that all the beds are full at the local border patrol offices due to the recent capture of some other refugees from Afghanistan), they slowly begin to understand each other. And anyone who has seen Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (or, more pointedly, Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) can guess what happens next: As Svetla and Bamba grow closer, the surrounding community acts as a counterforce to their impending happiness. All of the bubbling fear-driven racist violence comes rushing to the fore; friendships are severed; racial epitaphs are hurled. Hristov keeps the proceedings firmly in the realm of satire, however – besides Sirk, another major touchstone here seems to be the bleak, black and white morality tales of Bela Tarr – heaping scorn upon the bumbling town mayor (Kristina Yaneva) and especially the slimy town predator, Ivan (Ivan Savov).
Yancheva’s performance as Svetla is the real draw here. She brings a latter-day Frances McDormand-level of gravitas to her portrayal of a woman who has lived and loved and been hurt but who still has inner capacities yet untapped. Several of the townspeople are amusing, especially the chief of police/real political power in town, Bochev (Stoyan Bochev). But unfortunately, the reason that Fear can’t be said to be truly successful as a film is because of the thinly drawn portrayal of Bamba. Not through any fault of the actor – Fleming does a fine job with the character as written. We are never given much of a backstory for him – all we know is that he is a doctor and that his wife and children were victims of a war going on in Mali – and the fact that he doesn’t speak Bulgarian limits the amount of agency he can have over the plot. But perhaps the weakest decision that Hristov made when crafting this character was his decision to make him so exceptionally decent, almost saintly in his patience and good cheer towards the ignorance hurled his way. Hristov, in attempting to send the righteous message that all people are deserving of human rights and respect, no matter how much of an “other” they may be, has simply overshot the mark in this case. The character of Bamba shares many similarities with those portrayed by the late Sidney Poitier – somewhat too perfect to be realistic and burdened with the responsibility of representing an entire race for mainly pedagogical purposes. Nevertheless, Fear is worth seeking out for its main performance, as well as for the timely message it sends about the human tendency towards fear of the stranger and of our eternal obligation to overcome it.
Photo courtesy of Hidden Empire Releasing
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