October 26, 2023

Rožytė (Vida Gumbytė) was a Vilnius street icon, whom I met in person a couple times. She was a warm and friendly beggar, known to many visitors of our old town by her distinctive multi-layered and very colorful dressing style, and very genuine makeup.

I knew from some old articles that she lived in a village outside Vilnius, and would commute to the city and back by train pretty much every day, until she died a couple years ago.

I hoped th… read the rest.

Rožytė (Vida Gumbytė) was a Vilnius street icon, whom I met in person a couple times. She was a warm and friendly beggar, known to many visitors of our old town by her distinctive multi-layered and very colorful dressing style, and very genuine makeup.

I knew from some old articles that she lived in a village outside Vilnius, and would commute to the city and back by train pretty much every day, until she died a couple years ago.

I hoped that this film would be a proper tribute to her life. I hoped it would tell the viewers things like her backstory, what she did in her youth, how her typical beggar day would look, how people would interact with her, whether she had any memorable encounters she'd like to share, stuff like that. But there was none of that.

Instead, the film focuses on her final year(s), showing us a feeble old lady in her run-down ranch, who feeds her cats bread and can barely hold a conversation, possibly due to bad hearing, but also probably because she's getting senile. But oh well, at least you're shown that even these days she cared about her looks.

Extra credit goes to amateur-level animation. In fact, it works quite well when these intermissions are relevant and take a few seconds at a time (like the emergency van sequence). Where it hurts really bad is a few cringy couple-minutes-long intermissions, which add nothing to the story and only seem to be thrown in in order to make the film longer and feature songs by Vytautas Kernagis in full. I almost left the movie after one such intermission.

A friend of mine even had doubts about the legality of this film itself, because without proper reassurance, it's easy to suspect that Rožytė wasn't told she was being filmed, and only signed up for being photographed.

All in all, I found this film mostly boring, depressing and meaningless.

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