A possible end - An homage to 'Waiting for Godot'

The chirping of birds over the black frame prepares us for that countryside fork in the road, with two paths leading from the foreground to the background, both of them into the future. The brightly colored composition in Deniz Arslan’s first short film A possible end – An homage to ‘Waiting for Godot’ ranges from a lush bright green to a pleasant ocher and a clear sky blue: Two men wearing hats enter this classic scene.

One is dressed in a shirt and warm-up jacket (Stefano Bernardin), the other somewhat staidly (David Wurawa); the former is impulsive and emotional, the latter quiet and determined. They are obviously apparitions from a major 20th-century text: Arslan’s reinterpretation of Samuel Beckett’s two-man play Waiting for Godot illustrates the separation between intellect and body, the person issuing orders and the one receiving them in the same way as the original. Discussions concerning cigarettes and borrowed shirts, the past and the future, and Godot make Arslan’s film seem at first to be a conventional fragment of the play, but A possible end, as the title indicates, is actually a newly created epilogue.

The short film’s real strength lies in its playful approach, its respectful disrespectfulness. It demonstrates both an examination of the genesis of narrative forms, topoi and motifs, and at the same time a requisite youthfulness in the appropriation of and work with someone else’s material, at a pleasant remove from the canon. What would happen if the two men got tired of waiting for Godot? These lovers part with their common past with warnings, recommendations and good intentions, and stride into a horizon of saturated colors. Hope and sadness hang in the air. This is precisely what an homage should be like.
(Markus Keuschnigg)
Translation: Steve Wilder