Over its 700-year history, Vilnius has had many roles, and on the occasion of its jubilee, will play the lead in the film Vilniaus pokeris (Vilnius Poker). Based on Ričardas Gavelis’ novel of the same name, the film informs the city’s identity and promises to bewitch the viewer with its brilliance, mystical atmosphere and musical score.
The culture of Vilnius is multifaceted. The city changed over seven centuries and yet remained relevant. This jubilee is its time to create a new legend welcoming the future and melding the historical and the contemporary lines of mythology. Vilniaus pokeris is a mysterious tale of life, love and death in a city which exists outside the boundaries of time, memory and reality. The film’s score was presented at a concert in November, 2022. The film’s trailer and second jazz concert will be introduced to the public on January 28. The word is that this is a work like none other, encompassing the modern, impetuous “700-years-young” face of Vilnius in this interdisciplinary piece of art.
Many Lithuanian artists were involved in this project – jazz musicians, artists, sculptors and photographers. Born of a legend about an iron wolf, Vilnius itself became a legend, which author Ričardas Gavelis brought forth in his 1989 novel. On screen, Vilnius is said to play itself – city-legend, city-fantasy, city-vision, with no past, no present and no future, but where present time and history, reality and visions coexist. Jazz is a fundamental motif in the novel, but in the hands of director Donatas Ulvydas and other creators of the film, the score becomes a full avantgarde jazz concert, performed by the Vilnius Jazz Ensemble.
For those unfamiliar with Vilnius Poker, a few notes on the book itself. In a review for the journal Lituanus when the English translation by Elizabeth Novickas was published, author Julija Šukys wrote that Gavelis caused a sensation in Lithuania in 1989 when his novel Vilnius Poker appeared. Sąjūdis was gaining momentum, the USSR was changing in ways that few had predicted, and here was a book unlike anything Lithuanian readers had seen before. The novel tells of an attempt to reconcile with public and private pasts and a struggle to survive in a soul-killing system that denies history. Portraying a group of acquaintances and colleagues whose lives intersect in Vilnius, the novel is a murder mystery: the death of a young woman named Lolita is narrated by four unreliable narrators whose contradictory versions of events are replete with sex, torture, and a nightmarish Vilnius that itself becomes a character in the novel.
Translated into English in 2009, Vilnius Poker is perhaps the most famous of modern Lithuanian novels, Mikko Toivanen wrote last year. In his review he noted that it is a massive work, bewildering and frequently infuriating, yet also laden with moments of transcendental brilliance. The setting is Vilnius under Soviet rule in the 1970s. The story follows Vytautas Vargalys, a rebellious cynic trapped in a meaningless job as a cataloguer at a public library, and his developing relationship with a mysterious, idealized woman introduced merely as “Lolita”. The heart of the novel beats in Vargalys’s obsessive investigations into a – perhaps supernatural, possibly imaginary – nefarious cabal only referred to as Them that secretly controls everything. Even one’s private thoughts are not secure; even the pigeons are suspect. Because of Them, “in the eternal war between the darkness and the light a soulless gloom always wins”. Vargalys’s total paranoia reflects the oppressive conditions of life in Soviet Lithuania, yet one could easily enough transpose the narrative, down to its most outlandish details, to our present day of Qanon, in Toivanen’s view.
The co-creators of the upcoming film are also curating an exhibition of paintings and sculptures to show the public the works used in the film. Photographers will also contribute their photos expressing their relationship with Vilnius.
And this is only the beginning of this momentous anniversary!
