'The Father' ('Bashtata'): Film review | Karlovy Vary 2019. A dysfunctional family funeral sparks a wild road trip in this prize-winning Bulgarian tragicomedy
is a bittersweet family farce set in the rural Bulgarian hinterlands, a place where people still trust more in ancient superstition and magical folklore than in crooked state bureaucracy. The story may test the limits of plausibility in places, but overall this off-the-map road movie is a humane, compassionate, character-driven delight.reunites Grozeva and Valchanov with several key crew and castmembers from their previous features.
At a family funeral in the sunny countryside, long-buried generational fault lines soon resurface. Flustered 40-ish advertising man Pavel has driven back to his home region from his new cosmopolitan life in the capital city Sofia, arriving just in time to see his beloved mother Valentina buried.
Meanwhile, Pavel's permanently buzzing cellphone rudely disrupts the solemn burial ceremony. Back home in Sofia, his heavily pregnant wife has not been informed about the funeral, and is becoming increasingly suspicious about her husband's vaguely explained absence. Missed phone messages become a motif throughout the film, serving both as literal plot device and metaphor for communication problems between the main protagonists.
After the funeral, Vassil outlines his plans for a commemorative painting of Valentina, incorporating his colorfully goofy beliefs in New Age pseudo-science. He also insists that mysterious posthumous phone calls from his late wife prove that she is trying to contact him from the astral plane.
The escalating battle of wills between stubborn father and skeptical son that follows is full of great comic vignettes, including a deliciously deadpan confrontation with local police over a stolen jar of homemade jam, and a creepy brush with opportunistic hospital staff desperate to squeeze maximum profit from minor medical misfortune.
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