Black Brush

Black Brush is one of those movies that sound interesting when you are having the plot explained to you. (Chimneysweeps steal a goat from Hare Krishnas! Ganesha with a goat’s head appears to a doped-up goat! A hallucinatory priest suddenly becomes a goat-headed creature! A man slaughters a goat with a samurai sword in order to retrieve an eaten lottery ticket!) Unfortunately, unless you have a prurient interest in goats, it is anything but. This film is as dull as ditchwater.

At no point could I be persuaded to care about any one of our four societal drop-out chimneysweeps whose every move seems to be in some way governed by a goat. The fact that stoners are smoking dope that has first been fed to (yes) a goat, and then retrieved from its droppings, does not make the resulting conversation any more interesting than ordinary stoner talk. Also, whether it was the fault of the dialogue or the translation, there were several points in which the conversation (drug-addled or not) made very little sense at all.

The fact that this is all filmed in shadowy sepia tones means that not even a bit of colour can distract the mind from these four Hungarian men’s plod through the narrative; losing money, gaining money, fighting, bonding, smoking, slaughtering and puking and never once sparking in me a single trace of empathy. They are also not particularly aided by the strange clickings and whistlings of the soundtrack, which seems to want the film to be quirky and fun instead of a somnambulant visual dirge.

The only thing about this film that really had any interest for me was noticing how many times the protagonists’ mobile phones rang, and the fact that every time one did my initial reaction was that someone in the cinema hadn’t bothered to turn their phone to silent mode. An interesting enough reaction, but not something that would have grabbed my attention while watching a decent film.