A year after a nuclear war destroyed Earth, some 850 surviving people live inside an underground dome that protects them from outside radiation. Soft is one of them. He invented a myth of an Ark that will save the people in order to keep up everyone's morale. Soft is in love with Gea, a prostitute, but she is increasingly losing her mind and falling ever deeper into superstition and irrationality, until she fatally falls from heights while walking on a rope, practicing to enter the Ark from above. Another deranged man froze two women in a tank, waiting for the Ark to unfreeze them. A dying engineer reveals to Soft that the dome was designed to hold for only a year, after which it will collapse, but that there is a map that points to a hangar with an airplane. Soft gets the map from his boss, hoping to escape, but finds out that the airplane was shredded a long time ago by a man assigned to create metallic currency. A crack in a wall creates an illuminated portal, and all the people walk towards it, thinking the Ark has arrived, but Soft realizes that the dome is collapsing and it is the end. Outside the snowy landscape, he has a hallucination of Gea picking him up with a balloon.
This dark, pessimistic post-apocalyptic science-fiction film is an allegory on the debilitating effects of a clash between the human illusion and reality. The whole story is basically a story about dying, and about the people who, in order to escape from such a despair, start creating a self-delusion that there is a salvation and hope, who start "bargaining" with the reality, even though, objectively, there is no basis for it. Despite its limited budget, "O-Bi, O-Ba" is directed surprisingly competently and technically sound by director Piotr Szulkin, who created dirty, phantasmagorical "underground" set designs reminiscent of Gilliam's "Brazil", using long tracking shots of the protagonist Soft walking through endless corridors and unusually strong blue colors in cinematography, resulting in several expressionistic sequences (people fighting for food that is dropped to them from a pipe on the ceiling; their old clothes make them look like a leper colony; Gea practicing walking on rope, thinking she will enter the nonexistent Ark from above). Kudos should also be given to the leading actor, Jerzy Stuhr, who carries the entire film with ease. In one memorable moment, prostitute Gea has this exchange with him: "You sell your brains for money, I sell my body. What's worse?" Another one has Soft talk with a librarian who thinks he will preserve books for some future generations: "There are a lot of good collective books. About the Booroos' geopolitics, the Booroos' plotting, the real face about Booroodemocracy... There was an order to leave only books about the Booroos!" A grim commentary on determinism and a nightmarish walk through a wrecked world, where the only thing left for the people is to permanently lie to themselves that something good is going to happen, but such a superstition creates even more damage through its growing irrationality: a black pearl from the 80s, though not for everyone's taste.
Grade:+++
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