THE INVISIBLE FIGHT - Mark Reviews Movies

The Invisible Fight, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 22, 2024

"Forgive my religious propaganda," the wannabe kung fu monk tells a foe. "It's just my style." That's also part of the style of writer/director Rainer Sarnet's The Invisible Fight, as it mixes the physics-defying fighting of a particular brand of martial arts movie, some broadly satirical ideas about life in the Soviet Union, and a lot more straight-faced Christian theology than one might anticipate from something so intentionally cheesy and goofy. It's an odd movie on its face, but it's odder—in a far less successful way—in how disparate its superficial elements and underlying ideas are.

It doesn't help that the movie's best material comes right at the top, before Sarnet's jarring approach emerges and the singular gag of the one-joke premise runs thin. It's 1973, and along the border of the USSR and China, a trio of Chinese martial artists are about to infiltrate a Soviet military base.

These are no ordinary fighters, though. No, they don leather jackets, platform shoes, and big sunglasses, while wearing their hair long and traveling to heavy metal music blasting from a portable radio. They can basically defy gravity, too—jogging on air, leaping from treetop to treetop, hopping over the exterior wall of the base. The resulting fight, which isn't much of one for the overwhelmed Soviet soldiers, has members of the trio dodging bullets and, in one inspired moment, dancing atop the barrel of an automatic rifle. Sarnet has fun with the ridiculous choreography and the assorted trickery—most of it, such as how a man running along a wall is clearly just the camera aimed at a floor, very noticeable—that makes these feats possible.

With that tone set, we meet Rafael (Ursel Tilk), the sole survivor of the attack, who returns home to live with his mother (played by Maria Avdjushko) in a cramped apartment, certain that the experience is a sign that he should become a master martial artist. His mother disapproves, and a night club fight, which isn't much of one for the guy, with a man who doesn't like the attention Rafael is giving his fiancée shows that our protagonist doesn't have any training to back up his words. The woman, by the way, is Rita (Ester Kuntu), who works at a local food dispensary and becomes more of an experiment for testing social and gender norms than an actual character.

Anyway, Rafael's car breaks down in front of a monastery one day, and upon learning that the Orthodox Christian monks and priests who live there have powers akin to the ones he wants to learn, he decides to train with them. Nafanail (Inrek Sammul), the most skilled and spiritual of the monks, takes the stranger's arrival as a divine sign that Rafael must be destined for some greatness. The monk's apprentice Irinei (Kaarel Pogga) sees the newcomer as a clown and an obstacle to his own ambitions.

The formal style of the movie is fairly consistent, with cinematographer Mart Taniel emphasizing bold colors, inserting artificial scratches, and providing herky-jerky camera moves and zooms that give this a sense of being some lost-and-discovered artifact from the era of the story's setting. Just about everything else about the material—apart from the performances, which find a fine balance between self-mockery and sincerity—is decidedly inconsistent.

The primary element of note is how much of the tale comes down to the teaching or preaching of theology. Rafael is repeatedly lectured to about subjects as broad as judgment, forgiveness, and humility and particulars as specific as holy relics and hand gestures signaling various tenets of faith. Occasionally, some action arises from these lessons, such as an inspired bit in which Irinei attempts to teach Rafael about being both strong and delicate by way of what's essentially a food fight, but for the most part, these ideas are meant to be taken seriously.

On one level, it's a pleasant surprise that Sarnet has deeper notions in mind, given how gimmicky—albeit entertaining—that introductory sequence and the story before Rafael's arrival at the monastery are. On another, though, the theological intentions of the material are so reflective that they inherently clash with the over-the-top stylings of the movie's presentation, and the filmmaker's sudden tonal shifts upon coming to these moments do give them an air of preachiness. It's not quite an act of baiting-and-switching, because Sarnet outright states what seem to be movie's more evangelical goals (that line from the top and the insistence that the Soviet Union bans "everything cool," which would include this branch of religion). The method is, though, contradictory to the story's initial setup and the movie's otherwise whimsical mode of operation.

All of this also means that the gimmickry and humor of The Invisible Fight deflate much more quickly and with more severity than one might expect. We get a one-joke and a one-idea story, in other words. Neither has much staying power, and each is in tonal and narratively practical conflict with the other.

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