The Color of the Chameleon (2013)

• 40%
• 2013
• Comedy
• Drama
• Thriller
• Emil Christov
• Rousy Chanev
• Irena Milyankova
• Deyan Donkov

Batko becomes a secret-police informant. He performs his duties with great zeal, and yet he is unduly dismissed. His ego is badly hurt. His experience with clandestine work makes him realize a simple fact - the system of the political police is flawed by nature. Secrecy is both, its power and weakness. The system depends on the presumed authenticity of the agents and recruitment of informants based on fear. The operations of the secret police could be imitated by rogue individuals posing as agents. Batko creates a phantom secret-police department - a back door in the matrix of political control. He becomes the spider in his own web of informants by recruiting a group of intellectuals to spy on each other. He builds his own secret archive. After the fall of communism, Batko uses it to wreak havoc on the government. This is a dark political comedy. A self-styled secret agent engineers a fake political institution that replicates and mocks the omnipotent system of the secret police. A bold political con is launched by a seemingly ridiculous man. His creation becomes a Trojan horse in the apparatus of fear, causing general chaos and making the system look like one stupendous absurdity. The movie offers a paradoxical twist in the standard representation of totalitarianism as a society of victims and victimizers. This is a story without innocents. It exposes the maniacal desire to collaborate and the pleasure of spying on others, the temptation to conform and at the same time hack the system using its own devices. Secret policing reveals its dark nature not only in its nauseating cruelties, but most suggestively in its deviant pleasures.