Better Go Mad in the Wild review – boozing, bantering hermits impart their spiritual wisdom

Director Miro Remo journeys deep into the Czech countryside to find two brothers living an isolated life filled with quixotic wisdom in this surreal documentaryNarrated by a slaughtered bull, this extraordinary film takes the less-travelled path in charting the daily life of a pair of Czech twins a long way off conventional routes themselves. František and Ondřej Klišík are slowly going mad – or maybe closing in on enlightenment – in a cabin in the Šumava mountains and, extrapolating a short story about the brothers by Aleš Palán, director Miro Remo succumbs productively to the prevailing cabin fever – not only egging these longbeards on in their squabbling and loopy philosophising, but pitching in with his own fabulism and surrealism.Closing on 60, “Franta” and “Ondra” still farm their smallholding with the help of Nandy, a mutinous bull ill-chosen as a draught animal. In their downtime, they booze, banter and bicker, lament their lack of prospects with the fairer sex, and blow off steam in epic arm-wrestling bouts. Despite an arm lost to a sawmill accident, it’s Franta who’s usually the victor; he is also possessed by a quixotic streak absent in his bluff sibling. Letting loose streams of poetry into the air like bunting, wishing “joy to all conscious beings”, he is also constructing his own Da Vinci-style perpetual flying machine. “Your aversion to my perpetuum is a little annoying,” he informs the exasperated Ondra. Continue reading...