BBFF Interview: Tomas Vengris

The Boston Baltic Film Festival runs from Friday, 2/28 through Sunday, 3/2 at the Emerson Paramount Center, and through 3/17 virtually. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage!

Just like falling in love, the most exciting part of watching a movie is in the beginning. A first viewing is much like the “honeymoon phase,” or the Valentine’s Day vision of love, as Tomas Vengris, the American-Lithuanian director of Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania referred to it in our interview. Second and third viewings usually pull one out of the easy first impressions and easy-earned charisma, revealing more and more difficulties and flaws.

Most movies are not conducive to multiple viewings. Five and a Half Love Stories is not like most movies. The one-location anthology follows a series of frustrated “love” stories that all take place in the same apartment in the Lithuanian capital—and it gets better with each watch. This is my third time viewing Vengris’s great film in fewer than two years. I was at the world premiere in Tallinn, Estonia, where it took home the prize in the Rebels With a Cause competition program at the 2023 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) for boundary-pushing art. I watched it again from the comfort of my home (and on a smaller screen) in preparation for the Boston Baltic Film Festival and again when it showed at the Emerson Paramount Center. I’ve even reviewed the film on two separate occasions. I grow more fond of the well-thought-out compositions, more compelled by the romantic liaisons, and more enraptured in the world of this apartment every opportunity I have to catch it. The film took an enviable fifth place in my list of the Top Ten Films of 2023.

The vignettes supply a superb mix of comedy and heartbreak, sexiness and disturbance, intrigue and mundanity—a mix honoring the messiness of love. The guests are about as diverse as their problems: a bachelorette party, an Israeli couple investigating pre-Shoah family history, a bisexual male stripper who pretends to live in the unit to impress another man, and more. What they all have in common is that the couples that rent the apartment arrive at pivotal points in their relationships, crossroads of love. These are not the kinds of love stories that populate Netflix teen romances nor the steamy box-office sensations of Challengers or Babygirl, steaminess that flows from the mystery of the newness of the sexual partners. Five and a Half Love Stories is more concerned with what happens after the Valentine’s Day phase, what happens when partners hurt each other, what happens when they love one another but are no longer happy. It’s an area of cinema that’s less sexy and less explored for that reason.

The title does a lot of important framing. Beyond referencing the number of “love” vignettes collected, it also plays with real estate marketing language of “2.5 bathrooms” and “3.5 bedrooms,” bringing commodity and exploitation into focus, themes that lurk most strongly in the second and fourth stories, as well as the occupational transitions of the cleaner (a typically lower-class profession). There’s something else going on with the title, too. The “half” of the fraction reads brokenness or incompleteness into the film’s imagining of romantic encounter—and that brokenness is something all of the shorts share, even though they can also be incredibly sweet at times.

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Read Joshua’s full review of Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania in the Boston Hassle here and his earlier review in Offscreen here.

Boston Hassle: When did you first pick up a camera?

Tomas Vengris: A little embarrassing. I found myself playing with toys longer than it was socially acceptable for a teenage boy to be playing with Micro Machines and Legos and all this stuff. And I had a friend who was also playing more than it was socially [acceptable], and his dad had a camera and this video capture car, he had all this stuff. Well, [It was more socially acceptable] to make movies instead of playing. And so we would shoot.

BH: How old were you?

TV: It doesn’t matter. I don’t know. Like fifteen.

He had this micro machine, a whole battlefield, and we’d fly the camera over it. We’d dress up in fatigues we found at a surplus store and [we would] film, like, running backlit through this tunnel. Then we’d cut it together and [we were] like, “Oh, this is way more interesting.” So, I started learning film techniques before watching good films.

I [also] remember my first film class in undergrad [at Columbia University]. I wasn’t studying film yet. We started learning about Eisenstein and montage and diegetic sound, and I [realized] this is the stuff that we were figuring out in our own kind of geeky, playful way. What if we cut to these random faces? It was an interesting process of learning through making and through having this technology available, which was slightly before you could plug a camera into a computer and just edit it. You still needed a few steps between.

I was just lucky.

BH: Was it 8mm or a consumer camera?

TV: It was consumer cameras. It was probably a VHS camera or a Betacam, but you needed this video capture card, a separate piece of hardware to convert it to a digital.

Anyway, they were things not every kid had access to, and it was my friend’s dad who happened to just be this tech geek who had all this stuff. He also had all these World War II documentaries. I couldn’t tell you what it was now … some like eight cassette, World War II documentary collection. And we’d be cutting together footage of Hitler rallies or Mussolini’s rallies with rallies from my high school, my pep rallies from my high school before football games. The cheers were identical and this is kind of how we learned.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.