Welcome to “Your Weekly Short,” a LakeFrontRow.com feature that showcases one short from a Wisconsin filmmaker each week, every week. Brace thy face.
While the characters in “Baden Krunk” certainly don’t speak German, I’d make an educated guess that co-writers and directors Patrick Holland and Anthony Wood have at least a passing familiarity with the language. In their self-described “mock foreign film,” the perpetually unlucky Hans Hinkelmeier (Holland) sputters a kind of faux Germanic speak, somewhere between “Deutsch,” Yiddish, and nonsense. When his polka band mates aren’t spontaneously combusting, Hans is lopping off various appendages and mixing up his eye drops with the acid — we’ve all been there. “Baden Krunk,” roughly translated to “bad luck” in Germannish, is a tightly-packaged encapsulation of one man’s misfortune. When Death himself (Wood) finally appears, it’s less a stroke of bad luck as it is the next likely downturn of the day.
Winning “Best Wisconsin Film” at the 2011 Milwaukee Short Film Festival, most of “Baden Krunk” is darkly comic aesthetic, despite its initial questions of misfortune and what form “Lady Luck” may come in. Perfectly preserved with tightly framed shots that match Hans’ tin bubble of a trailer home, there’s a somber exuberance here that blends the downtrodden wheezes of an accordion with monochrome photography. Holland and Wood only break from their rigid, black & white shots with a single, celebratory eruption of fireworks amid a climax that more than recalls Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. But once again, Holland and Wood tweak surface elements, replacing Bergman’s placid sour with playfulness and a game of chess with anti-gravity checkers.