What a refreshingly different film: poetic, stubborn, slow, mysterious, open-ended, Beckettian, mesmeric, elegiac, allusive, Tarkovskian, haunting, arch... yet personal and not-at-all challenging in the least. No wonder Roger Ebert doesn't quite 'get' it. And whilst I can make a stab at what the allegorical political references are being made here, it somehow doesn't matter at all. Indeed, find a synopsis of the (somewhat absurd-sounding) plot before reading the film, if only to marvel later how the result on-screen is, somehow, completely different.
Synopsis: A naive young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.