Die Leiden des Jungen Dominik

Poor dear young Dominik has it all – private schools, fancy gadgets and money. Unfortunately for him, his world is full of expensive things, but emotionally empty. In reality, everything, even the friendship of his classmates, is possible to buy. At the same time a reality is large and empty like his darkened room, where only a computer monitor is blinking. No surprise that the reality stands on the same level as Dominik’s Facebook profile. The answer of Dominik to a meeting with the evil side of reality, his accident during judo, is a classical defense of emotionally isolated but on the other hand spoiled individuals – hysteria behind which a desire for someone close to chat with is hiding. The parents, acting like real machines and not people, are not able to provide Dominik sufficient emotional background. Dominik doesn’t know how things work in real world, so he comes back to the Internet and finds here substitutionary world for the real or pseudo-real Facebook world.

At that moment of Dominik’s desperation Sylwia appears on his chat list. From the beginning, they are connected by the sympathetic felling, so he contacts her again and joins the group called „Suicide room“ in an on-line virtual world reminding Second Life. The world itself is enticing and well-conceived, creating the necessary atmosphere to invite us into this alternative life. The more Dominik escapes from real world, the more he develops his character in the virtual world. At first, his avatar is his perfect physical embodiment, but later he creates fighter avatar and still later, at the end of the movie, he develops into some kind of goth-lover. However, these sequences fail to bring in the necessary completion to the story. Mainly because of two basic flaws. Firstly, in spite of the fact that Sylwia is the queen of this virtual world, her reign is nothing, but irritating mannerisms. The second reason is absolutely no internal policy of the inside world of the „Suicide room“. At first, Dominik seems to be an intelligent boy. Then I couldn’t believe that he could be manipulated so easily. Just at this moment, when Sylwia’s brainwashing had begun, I started to feel the ambivalent chemistry of the film working upon me and I gained the feeling that the only person with common sense in both worlds (virtual and real) is avatar Jasper, who says before the virtual execution: „She has brainwashed us.“ I think, Komasa tries to do the similar thing. In the next part of my essay I want to focus on the style, compositional illogicalities and mistakes of the film.

Komasa admits in one Czech interview2, that he is fond of Emo and Goth(ic) style and Twilight tetralogy, therefore he used some elements of those styles in his film. The style of the film is really distinctive. Most of the scenes take place at night and the color spectrum oscillates between dark shades of blue and black. The style also uses some elements typical for west/global production. Visualization of thoughts/written texts in mise en scene, split screen during webcam chats, and the same visual style in virtual world as in Japanese anime are used. Many scenes work well as a videoclips thanks to the music by Billy Idol and Wet Fingers and to the cool look of slow motion. Thus, the visual side of the film looks very spectacular, dark and emo, regardless of stylization of Dominik, who, even before his indoctrination by Sylwia, represents a typical example of emo boy from vampirefreaks.com website or something like that. Sometimes, the style seems to be inconsistent with the idea of the film, which (I hope) tries to be anti-suicidal. There is a question, whether Komasa wants to tell a story about alienation as a critique or as a glorification, mainly because the style of the film definitely supports the second choice. So, there is no wonder that most of the fans of this movie are young people aged x-teen (or older, me being the example). This fact can be easily verified by the average age of the voters on IMDb, by fan videos on YouTube or by searching the information about the film on blogs. There is therefore no surprise when Sala samobójców is on their blogs next to My Chemical Romance videos, notes about difficult adolescence and slash fiction.

The final part of the film gradates ad absurdum. Dominik, before he finally loses the rest of his common sense, tries to talk Sylwia out of committing a suicide, but after a spectacular bloody cybersex (?) he submits to her. In the manner of deus ex machina, angry and desperate parents (played very stereotypically throughout the film as very bad and helpless parents) stop the existence of virtual world when they disconnect Dominik’s computer from the Internet which later on will cause actual and permanent “disconnection” of Dominik from his real life.