Loved it! “Returning to Reims” starts (ah, if only it had ended the same way!) with a live-recording of a voice-over for a sort of docu-drama about an estranged man returning home after the death of his father he never really knew how to love (and vice versa). Fast forward thirty or so years and relocate to Estonia and this could have been me. The production – a woman's voice and a montage of images, both from the archive and directed – does make you listen in its simplicity, does invite you to wonder whether social class and especially that of the working man sets one's future in stone. And whether it is possible to break out and still have a healthy relationship with your circumstances. But then … I hated it!
Suddenly the director no more trusts the selected medium and decides to underline just how stupid and arrogant the characters on stage are. How they're doing the film only to satisfy their own vanity. The way it is done – playing out a lazy clash of ideas in a dialogue accompanied by overacted, borderline caricature depiction of characters – is just frustrating and makes you long for the original story to continue. Perhaps, just perhaps, this and the following voice-over text that moves from the personal history to a political one is meant to demonstrate how even if we believe in the power of the System, there's always hope for those individuals who have the intellectual capacity to understand and work around the System. Even if this success comes with a price of always being the outsider.
Yes, perhaps but the returning to a personal history, this time to the one of the actress's father, fails to really tie the knots intellectually and even contradicts the notion of the opportunity to break the System as there's always a system in these opportunities itself. Sounds like a thought-provoking and cleverly conducted stage-essay, doesn't it, but the problem is exactly that: it looks and sounds like a good production but doesn't make me believe that it's anything more than a calculated voice-over for a theme that deserves passion.
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