Sundance 2010 - The Temptation of St. Tony

I'm starting with last night's films and working my way back to the start, so the viewing and the review postings will not be chronological in any way.
The Temptation of St. Tony is an Estonian film, the first Estonian film ever to be accepted at Sundance, in several languages with subtitles.
At the Q&A the actors and set director who were present we asked about the metaphors in the film, and did their best to answer. With the director absent, they did an alright job, although I disagree with the interpretation they gave. It's been a long time since I've read Dante's Inferno, but at the end the movie struck me as a retelling of the Inferno in a contemporary setting. It helps that the movie began with the opening lines of Canto I,
"Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost."
But I thought that there was a lot more of Dante than just that, even the ending in the ice, you may recall that Dante's deepest circle of hell is ice.
Tony is a factory manager whose life spirals out of his control, though until the end of the film he seems more of an observer than a participant in his own existence, not even arguing when he is told he needs to shut down his factory and fire his workers because the profit was 19.3 rather than 20%.
Even after sleeping on it, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this film. It has a feel of both French New Wave cinema and the German expressionist cinema of the 1920s (with a little Dada on the side), and reminded me of something else that I can't quite pin down. Maybe a near-nightmare dream I had and can't recall.
The cinematography is beautiful, the stark black and white of winter in Eastern Europe, with fabulously abandoned buildings, gives a sense of cold, bleak powerlessness. Kind of how Tony seems to have been going through life.
I really like this movie, without knowing why. It's a shame that the showing at the Tower on Tuesday evening was sparsely attended, I hope it has a larger audience in Park City.
My biggest regret about the movie is that they did not use yellow subtitles which are much easier to read on black and white.
This movie is weird, dark, beautiful, sad, bloody and sometimes funny.
The Temptation of St. Tony is not the strangest movie I've ever seen at Sundance, I think that honor will always go to 1998's The Pigeon Egg Strategy, but it's right up there.