Issue 66 (2019) |
Vitalii Suslin: Head. Two Ears (Golova. Dva ukha, 2017) reviewed by Emjay O’Shea © 2019 |
Vitalii Suslin’s Head. Two Ears created a small sensation when it was released, garnering the Grigorii Gorin Prize for Best Script and the Diploma of the Guild of Cinema Researchers and Critics at Kinotavr, where it screened in competition. The film was a great success for the young director, who had graduated from VGIK in 2012. The work is Suslin’s second feature film project, following Defilé (2015), and preceding the director’s third feature film, The Seventh Run around the Outline of the Globe (Sed’moi probeg po konturu zemnogo shara) in 2019.
Head. Two Ears relates a brief episode in the life of Ivan, a dairy farmer in the Voronezh Region. Ivan is approached by a man in an expensive car, who promises him an honest and fairly remunerated position in the city. He is driven to the city, cleaned up, and pushed into committing fraud at a rather incredible number of micro-credit loan centers, before finally being abandoned and making his way back, on foot, to his village.
The work is often praised for its purported realism: the story presented here is actually taken from the real-life experience of Ivan Lashin, who plays himself in the film. Interestingly, Suslin himself is also from Voronezh Region, possibly contributing to the film’s sense of immediacy and stark representation. These and other aspects of the film work present the viewer with a world that appears recognizable and real. In this way, Suslin creates a discourse on typicality, which he then uses to make the viewer think about and engage with their own world and reality.
This emphasis on the typical marks the film. From the outset, Suslin portrays a life and setting that are detailed in their realism, but that are vague in their specifics: the viewer learns neither the details of Ivan’s person nor those of the life surrounding him. For example, the establishing shots relate a very particular atmosphere and milieu, but avoid any particularly telling buildings or monuments, giving the viewer the sensation that this story could be happening in any number of provincial cities.
This narrative of typicality is double-edged. On the one hand, it can easily be construed as a condemnation of the current state of affairs outside Saint Moscowsburg. Ivan’s difficult life conditions and complete lack of opportunity for bettering his situation can easily be extrapolated to apply to the vast provincial population. The idea of ‘the Great Unwashed’ is here given a life and a face—Ivan is not only poor and distinctly non-urban, but he is also physically dirty, and part of his transformation into a city dweller is a shower (represented almost as if it is one of his first). If one’s general knowledge of the decaying Russian countryside were not enough, the breadth of this problem is emphasized in a scene where a group of Ivan’s fellow village dwellers crowd around his mother, asking for Ivan to find them a connection in the city as well. As to the severity of life in the countryside, Suslin includes any number of references, for example his choices of mise-en-scène in Ivan’s living quarters—an improvised mobile home heated by a small wood stove with doors that don’t fully close and must be chained to shut them; or in the quarters of Ivan’s mother, where the two share a New Year’s Day soup in typical but decrepit surroundings.
The treatment of the film in public media brings out another side of this discourse on typicality. Suslin visited and showed his film in certain Corrective Labor Colonies, for example, in the Republic of Komi and in the Voronezh Region. An article about the visit in Komi relates that inmates found the film to be educational regarding certain dangers in modern society (Anon. 2019), and another article about the visit in a penal colony in the Voronezh Region quotes an inmate as saying “many of us have gone through such situations ourselves” (Grigor’ev 2018). This kind of treatment in the media uncritically normalizes the “typicality” of the film, thereby erasing certain societal questions and shifting responsibility for such misfortunes from society to the individual.
Head. Two Ears is largely defined by three driving aesthetic environments, which work together to create a narrative of dissonance throughout the film: these are the village and countryside, the dystopically juxtaposed poverty and wealth of an economically struggling provincial city, and the dream-sequence idyll of a natural life outside society. These three environments, presented in such drastically different ways, appear to be three completely separate worlds. This stark contrast is accentuated in various ways: for example, the warm, dark palettes of the barn scenes evoke different emotions than the fluorescent lighting of the shopping mall, which in turn presents a different affect than the bright sunlight in Ivan’s dreams. The distinct worlds, with their distinct aesthetic choices, build a narrative of dissonance that is held in parallel through the filmic and the conceptual; this narrative brings focus to perceptions and realities of center and periphery, the differences between them, and their mutual relation.
This narrative of dissonance continues in Suslin’s compositional choices. In the film, shots frequently include vertical lines and are often centrally weighted, often with a dividing line in the middle. Such a composition evokes the idea of the divide, creating a two-sidedness. This balance can also be seen as creating a certain symmetry, which furthers the narrative of dissonance, of the divide between city and countryside, since such a symmetry requires (at least) two sides that depend on each other. Another reading of the frequent centrally-weighted compositions links to the idea of simplicity and straightforwardness. Ivan is presented as simplistic, just as his environment and those around him.
Head. Two Ears is also a noticeably quiet film, including very little dialogue, but not lacking in diegetic (often specifically bodily) noises. The music in the film consists of three classical pieces, which present a notable contrast against both the relative quiet of the rest of the film and against the culture of the characters, seemingly far-removed from the lofty connotations of Mozart, Liszt, and Glinka.
Ultimately, a large part of Suslin’s film is not about the difficulties of life in isolation, but rather about the particular relationship of the city to the country, which is represented as that of a provincial town to its surrounding villages, but its dynamic could easily be transferred to the relationship between Russia’s capitals and its provincial cities. Important here is not just the rhetoric of inequality, but also that of condescension, and the way in which Aesop’s “town mouse” views the “country mouse.”
In Head. Two Ears, the two main urban characters treat Ivan as an expendable means to an end. They effectively steal him from the countryside, package him, squeeze every possible kopeck out of him, and then discard him in a symbolic space of soulless mass-production and animal abuse, McDonald’s. They treat Ivan like livestock, a creature whose life does not belong to himself, who exists with no choice but to serve others. Beyond the telling patterns of treatment, Suslin drives this notion home in one of the dream sequences. Ivan is amongst the cattle, until one cow walks in front of him, its broad flank taking up the whole frame. A beautiful aesthetic choice, showing the soft, living texture of the cow’s hide, Suslin’s frame also blocks out all other realities and directly presents only a single idea: Ivan—livestock.
The question of the relationship between the human and the beast is portrayed in parallel here, endowing the film with two symmetric but conceptually opposed notions of such a relationship. After all, Ivan is himself a dairy farmer and thus necessarily has a relationship with his livestock. However, his treatment of his own livestock is entirely different from the treatment he receives from the urbanites who exploit him.
The scenes in the beginning of the film that depict Ivan with his cattle are characterized by incredible warmth. Ivan’s poverty and difficult life (and that of his cattle as well) are evident. The animals live in a crowded barn, they are fed simple feed, and they give off an air of helplessness. However, this is not the same helplessness seen in Ivan in the city: that of the abandoned, abused, and superfluous creature. It is more akin to the helplessness of an infant before its caring mother. Suslin exhibits this care both in Ivan’s actions and in the way the cows are portrayed. Close-up, humanizing shots of their faces and kind eyes evoke warmth of soul. Ivan’s care for the cattle is further depicted in the dream sequences. Ivan’s dreams are not of modern wealth, technology, and cars; rather, he sees himself in an idyllic landscape, usually surrounded by his beloved cows. He is certainly dependent on them for a living, but his dream is of a better life for them as well. He is not selfish but caring, not calculating but hopeful.
Suslin’s film does not try to deny the realities of life by presenting some sort of utopian world, where everyone lives freely and well. He presents the world essentially as it is currently. He does not charge it with being necessarily evil, but he accuses humans of the way in which they interact with the world and with others. In a period of high individualism, we have lost touch with any sense of solidarity. It is easy to blame one’s actions on the surrounding circumstances, but Suslin asks us to question our values and outlook, our relationship to others. At the same time, he turns the viewers’ attention to the dynamic of the link between the dominant power structures and the people who prop them up.
Emjay O’Shea
University of Pittsburgh
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Works Cited
Anon. 2019. “Osuzhdennym IK-1 v Komi rasskazali o glavnoi sotsial'noi bolezni 21 veka.” Nevskie Novosti, 10 April.
Grigor’ev, Matvei. 2018. “Osuzhdennym semilukskoi kolonii pokazali fil’m ‘Golova. Dva ukha’.” Moskovskii Komsomolets Voronezh, 4 July.
Head. Two Ears, Russia, 2017
Color, 78 minutes
Director: Vitalii Suslin
Script: Vitalii Suslin, Ivan Lashin
DoP: Aleksei Malinkovich
Sound: Denis Korzhov
Editing: Ol’ga Kolesnikova
Cast: Ivan Lashin, Anna Makhlina, Tatiana Lashina, Grigorii Korotkin, Elena Kiseleva, Mikhail Maltsev, Vera Ter-Gabrielian, Anastasia Goloshchapova
Producer: Vitalii Suslin, Larisa Oleinik
Production Company: Mosfilm
Vitalii Suslin: Head. Two Ears (Golova. Dva ukha, 2017) reviewed by Emjay O’Shea © 2019 |