A surreal take on JULES ET JIM, BIRDS, ORPHANS, AND FOOLS - the third film of Slovak filmmaker Juraj Jakubisko (BATHORY) - details the love triangle between three orphans: Yorick (Jirí Sýkora, THE JOKE) - who grew up in a hospital for mentally handicapped children - Polish photographer Andrzej (Philippe Avron), and a strange Jewish girl Marta (Magda Vásáryová, THE COMET) named Martha who comes into their lives in a fittingly unconventional manner. While Yorick escapes reality by literally playing the fool while Andrzej makes a living for both of them taking photographs. The film's cloistered world is a series of derelict buildings where giant wardrobes function as closets and beds, and the titular orphans/fools share space with a flock of birds. Yorick and Marta take up together quickly, but their relationship sours for her when he wants to "give her" to virginal Andrzej. The childish games the three play (with each other and the residents of the children's hospital next door who are frozen in time by their mortality and being unwanted by the outside world) wear thin as Andrzej observes that Marta and Yorick torment each other, Marta doubts Yorick's love just as much as the stories he tells her about his heritage as the son of politician Milan Štefánik (who died fifty years before the story proper), and Yorick has time to reflect in jail ("I had time to think and felt empty inside"); indeed, it is unclear why he was arrested or why he went willingly, although it may have been another kind of escapism. The result is as much tragic as it is absurd. Photographed by Igor Luther and co-edited by Bob Wade, both of whom had worked on Alain Robbe-Grillet's French/Slovakian co-productions THE MAN WHO LIES and EDEN AND AFTER, the jarring and whimsical cutaways and digressions, the textural changes in the photography, and disorienting sound design only serve to remind the audience of the central trio's attempts to take refuge in madness.