Issue 76 (2022) |
Vladimir Munkuev’s Nuuccha (Sakha, 2021) reviewed by Elena Monastireva-Ansdell © 2022 |
Russophobic or Postcolonial?
The award-winning Buryat director Vladimir Munkuev, known for his feature shorts about Sakha/Yakutia, chose for his full-length feature debut, the 2021 historical drama Nuuccha, an adaptation of Waclaw Sieroszewski’s 1893 short story “Khailak,” or “Convict.” A Polish revolutionary turned writer and anthropologist during the fourteen years spent in Siberian exile, Sieroszewski describes a tragic encounter between a ruthless Russian criminal sentenced to a term in Siberia and a close-knit Yakut community among whom the tsarist government has stationed him forcibly. In the story, Yakuts call the criminal nuuccha, meaning “a Russian,” as a shortcut for his hard-to-pronounce name. Since Sieroszewski uses both khailak and nuuccha to refer to the Russian character, Munkuev’s change of the title may seem inconsequential. However, his emphasis solely on the prisoner’s ethnicity shifts narrative accents in a meaningful way; combined with carefully realigned power dynamics between the Russian and Yakut characters, it turns a rather straightforward parable of Yakut oppression under the tsar into a nuanced study of Russian colonial processes involving imperial power, emerging indigenous elites, ordinary Yakuts, and the involuntary Russian settler struggling for survival alongside his impoverished Yakut hosts. Set at the end of the nineteenth century with compellingly recreated costumes, domestic interiors, traditional customs and religious rituals, the film serves as an apt commentary on contemporary Russia that continues to operate as an imperial state.
The latest in a recent series of Sakha/Yakut directors to receive nationwide and international recognition, with Nuuccha Vladimir Munkuev builds on the successes of Eduard Novikov’s Tengriist parable The Lord Eagle (Tsar’-ptitsa, 2018), Liubov’ Borisova’s humorous drama The Sun Above Me Never Sets (Nado mnoiu solntse ne saditsia, 2019), Dmitrii Davydov’s mystical drama Scarecrow (Pugalo, 2020), and Stepan Burnashev’s thriller Black Snow (Kara khaar, 2020) that all won major awards at Russian and International film competitions, including the main prize at Moscow IFF, and grand prizes at Russia’s two key festivals, Kinotavr and Window on Europe. Solidifying this trend, Munkuev’s film received the Best Director award at the 2021 Kinotavr, as well as garnering the Grand Prix of the “East of the West” competition at the Karlovy Vary IFF in the Czech Republic the same year. A 2018 graduate of the Moscow Film School (established in 2012) who studied direction with Boris Khlebnikov and Aleksei Popogrebskii, Munkuev conceived of Nuuccha shortly after completing his graduation short Happiness (Jol, 2018). Inspired by rereading Sieroszewski’s short stories, familiar from childhood, without hope for ever realizing his ideas, Munkuev nonetheless shared them with Khlebnikov and producer Aleksandr Plotnikov. The pair enthusiastically teamed up with other prominent Moscow-based producers to sponsor the first Sakha film to receive extensive funding from outside of the republic, thereby building a bridge from local Sakha production to the national film industry concentrated in Moscow.
The recent indigenous film boom in Yakutia located five time zones away from the Russian capital, can be traced back to the formation of the Sakha-film company in 1992; but it truly began to gain momentum in the early 2000s, when two Sakha graduates from the Higher Courses of Scriptwriters and Directors in Moscow, Nikita Arzhakov and Viacheslav Semenov started making short features in the republic thereby jumpstarting the growing reputation and popularity of “Sakhawood” among the indigenous Sakha people. Shot in the Sakha language and addressing locally relevant issues that incorporated native myths and spiritual beliefs, Sakha films resonate deeply with the small but devoted audience of the roughly half million Sakha-speakers living in the million-strong republic. Working with budgets as small as tens of thousands of dollars and lacking elaborate studios, Yakut filmmakers collaborate closely and provide mutual assistance, often serving as drivers and on-site technicians at each other’s projects and sharing their privately purchased shooting equipment. Audience engagement is both the ultimate goal and a financial necessity as this is, along with the creative energy of the filmmakers, what drives Sakha cinema. One of the directors, Mikhail Lukachevskii (The Road/Doroga, 2012; A White Day/Belyi den’,2013) explains the nearly universal Sakha viewer support for Sakha films in the republic by their orientation toward grassroots participation: “When your own people make [films], one feels a part of the creative process. Why did he do it this way? He should have done it differently! Atta boy, played beautifully here. [They] comment on [our] films all the time” (Kuvshinova 2014).
Along with the national Sakha Theater, this cinema has become a critical factor in building Sakha national identity, often raising issues of cultural distinctness and political sovereignty from the remote center. Perhaps more straightforwardly than any other Sakha film to date, Nuuccha questions imperial power dynamics in the relationship between the indigenous Sakha people and the metropole, which has brought the director accusations of making an “anti-Russian” film. In interviews, Munkuev openly admits to interrogating Russia’s notional federalism and Russian society’s ingrained “imperial mentality”: “…all of Russia is a colony of one city. We still have a tsar who appoints his princes in each of the regions, where they execute his will.” At the same time, the director denies any intent to make a film about a “bad Russian”; “all the characters” in Nuuccha, he asserts, “represent Russia” and the actual ethnic Russian is far from the main villain in the film (Anon. 2021b). Interpreting Nuuccha closer to the spirit of the literary original, as a film about a bad Russian, actually leaves many of its aspects unexplored. Moreover, it contradicts its narrative and emotional logic.
In this, Munkuev’s rendering stands out from those of his fellow filmmakers. Sieroszewski’s anti-colonial text about a Russian criminal named Kostya taking over his Yakut hosts Khabdji and Keremes’ household and ultimately raping and killing Keremes, previously attracted the attention of both Sakha and Russian filmmakers. Most famously, Aleksei Balabanov utilizes the story in The Stoker (Kochegar, 2007) to make sense of the criminal mayhem defining Russia’s foundational period as a new post-Soviet state in the “roaring” 1990s. Balabanov maintains the original’s distinction between the ruthless Russian and his peaceful Yakut hosts who futilely attempt to curb the criminal’s aggression through lawful and ethical means. Balabanov’s protagonist, a concussed Soviet-Afghan-war veteran from Yakutia tends to a giant hearth heating Russia’s cultural-turned-criminal capital that is besieged by lawless violence. Simultaneously, he struggles to remember and commit to paper the plot of Sieroszewski’s story that he read prior to the Afghan war. His Russian fellow veterans turned criminal “businessmen” exploit the Yakut’s trust and mental disability: they use his ovens for incinerating the bodies of their murdered opponents explaining that they were all “bad people.” When one day the thugs bring and burn a poorly disguised corpse of the stoker’s daughter, the previously gentle man retaliates. Balabanov concludes his film with a short black-and-white enactment of the “script” found in the Yakut’s typewriter, in which an ominous-looking Russian criminal stationed in a poor Yakut couple’s household, takes over the house, beating the host and raping his wife. As the stoker explains in an earlier scene, Yakuts “cannot do anything” to counteract the Russian’s abuses, because “such is the law.” The story in the typewriter is unfinished, but the stoker completes it in real time, killing his daughter’s murderers and taking his own life. With every drop of blood draining out of the Yakut’s cut veins, the world becomes a bit less humane, and the humanity is clearly associated with the colonized Other.
Nikita Arzhakov’s Sakha short The Neighbor (D’ukaakh, 1999), also based on “Khailak,” features an equally immoral and physically menacing Russian and helpless Yakut community suffering from previously unseen immorality and aggression. Arzhakov’s Russian embodies existential evil that, through the film’s eerie cinematography and use of music, seems to invade the entirety of the Yakuts’ domestic and natural environment. The Russian “neighbor” stalks, rapes, and kills Keremes in a visually and emotionally evocative process that incrementally drains the household and the natural world around it of their spiritual essence.
In Nuuccha, Munkuev sets out to complicate Sieroszewski’s rather straightforward moral division into the Russian oppressor and the Yakut oppressed to allow for a more subtle examination of colonial processes in contemporary Russia. While a number of commentators saw change from “The Convict” to “The Russian” as a deliberately accusatory gesture connecting Russianness with criminality, the new title is, in fact, more neutral because it does not reinforce, but instead replaces, the old one. In Nuuccha, the sole Russian exile in a Sakha community is not a criminal—the film cursorily identifies him as a Narodnaya Volya activist—but simply the Other. As such, he serves as a means of interrogating Yakut national identity, a catalyst of interactions among Yakuts in their building of a relationship with the tsar, the empire, and the new set of colonial rules and power hierarchies. Munkuev’s choice of the slight and charismatic Sergei Gilev for the role of the Russian, contrasts with the image of the criminal brute of both the literary original and early film adaptations. Gilev perceptively plays Kostya as a man lost in an unknown land and culture, physically and emotionally exhausted, and forcefully uprooted from his former life which is symbolized by a small music box with a barely audible tune from Swan Lake’s tragic finale. Kostya periodically opens the box briefly to provide the only instrumental music soundtrack for the entirety of the plot. The film’s final shot and the closing nature photomontage additionally employ Maurice Ravel’s eerie “Le Gibet” piece from Gaspard de la nuit, which can be equally reflective of Kostya’s own unresolved position as a prisoner of the tsar, and of the devastation this visited on his Yakut host family.
The arrival of the Russian exposes a series of conflicts within the Yakut community that the film shows as much more fractured than in the original. Even though actual imperial power is located in the distant metropole (Khabdji at one point asks Kostya if he has seen the tsar), it reaches to the far Siberian lands via local chiefs appointed to rule over their own people. Rather than being responsible to his fellow villagers, the film’s Yakut chief upholds the interests of the tsar because his privileged position allows him to exploit his fellow Yakuts for personal benefit. The chief’s desire to profiteer at the expense of his people and his failure to advocate for them from fear of losing his position serves as one of the major causes of the tragedy.
Initially friendly and cooperative, Kostya unexpectedly turns into the couple’s oppressor, raping Keremes and beating and expelling Khabdji. This is the least convincing turn in the narrative, because it contradicts Kostya’s previously established character. This confusion possibly arises from Munkuev’s attempts to balance out Sieroszewski’s morally polarized antagonist and protagonists to investigate and assign individual responsibility for colonial subordination and oppression. Munkuev’s decision to change the social background of his Russian may be key to this incongruity. Political exiles constituted a very different category of prisoners; unlike criminals, they integrated well with Yakut communities organizing schools and practicing western medicine. Kostya’s contradictory image in Nuuccha seems to stem from Munkuev’s wish to reflect both positive and negative impacts of the Russian convict population on Sakha society. He thereby creates a composite character representing both a populist (narodnik) and a petty criminal who admits to stealing the music box and commits rape, but not murder.
Kostya’s rape of Keremes looks particularly forced because starting with his arrival in the couple’s house, the film constructs a sort of a romantic triangle, in which Kostya and Khabdji compete in the respective relationships they build with Keremes. The Yakut family experiences problems long before Kostya’s arrival, struggling with poverty and losing two children within a few years. Khabdji, who bought Keremes from the chief, treats her like a servant needed to run the household. Khabdji’s interactions with Keremes appear purely pragmatic with rare moments of intimacy showing no perceptible sense of connection. The film differentiates between the spouses, setting Khabdji up as better assimilated to the new colonial rule: he speaks good Russian, boasts about his service to Russian officials at a nearby fort, and slavishly follows the appointed chief’s orders even when they threaten his family’s survival. Proud of his integration into the more “civilized” ways, he rejects Keremes’ concerns based on local spiritual beliefs as stupid, and condescendingly describes her to Kostya as someone who does not understand any Russian and therefore is a “savage” (dikarka), the word he obviously picked up from Russian colonizers. Khabdji likewise objectifies Kostya: when first learning his name, Khabdji announces that it does not matter and he will simply call him nuuccha; from then on, he restricts Kostya’s use of his hunting gun, expresses little concern for his wellbeing, consistently tries to get rid of him, and sees his value merely in the physical labor he can contribute. The Yakut spiritual universe seems to communicate its discontent to Khabdji by closing off its natural resources to him as Khabdji fails to get fish or game for the family table. The Shaman invited to inquire into the reasons for the couple’s misfortunes, places the blame on Khabdji, telling him that he has angered the spirits of water and forest.
Keremes, on the other hand, embodies indigenous Yakut values that have been preserved from colonial influences. She keeps in close contact with nature, performing humble rituals that honor the spirits of her ancestors. She repeatedly asks Khabdji to give up the meager, restrictive privileges offered by the colonial “civilization” and embrace a more traditional way of life with the migratory Tungus. Unlike Khabdji, Keremes understands Kostya’s plight as a homeless exile, expressing concern for him getting lost on the way to the chief’s village and nursing him back to health in the aftermath of that disastrous trip. When the chief once again summons Khabdji to work on a long project, he abandons Keremes with the gravely ill Kostya on her hands, which sets up a possibility for a realignment of romantic relations. A recovered Kostya treats Keremes more humanely than Khabdji, helping her with household chores and proving a better fisherman, providing the much-needed physical sustenance. He also engages Keremes at a personal level, offering her tobacco and playing the music box for her. By the time Khabdji returns home, the two seem to establish a kind of interpersonal understanding that never existed between husband and wife. This is why Kostya’s subsequent rape of Keremes seems so out of character, even if seen as his desperate reaction to Khabdji’s reclaiming of his spouse upon his return. More understandable is his response to Khabdji’s violent beating of Keremes after he finds out about the rape and blames her for it. When Kostya beats up Khabdji and throws him out of the house, this seems like something the neglectful husband actually deserves.
Once again, Khabdji refuses to follow his wife’s plea to leave the colonized world with her. His final gesture symbolizes both his desperation at the colonial system’s indifference to its devoted servant’s plight and his betrayal of his wife whom he leaves in her rapist’s hands. The final scene indicates that with Khabdji’s departure and Keremes’ return to the household now headed by Kostya the process of colonization is complete. As Keremes and Kostya return to the house after burying Khabdji, the camera keeps the woman’s image in sharp focus in an otherwise blurred picture. Keremes momentarily stops as if considering whether to follow Kostya. When she finally resumes her movement in the direction of the house, she moves out of focus into the blurry sphere, as if forfeiting the native sovereignty and individual distinctness that defined her throughout the film.
Beyond the film’s complex interpersonal dynamics, it offers a sophisticated visual recreation of the austere natural beauty, unique folklore, and Shamanistic rituals of the Sakha land. Rather than exoticizing or idealizing Sakha culture, the use of folk imagery furthers the colonization theme. Thus, the elaborately spectacular burial ritual that the chief organizes for his gravely ill mother exposes his callousness and disregard even toward his closest kin. The mother was the chief’s most vocal critic, and her request to be buried alive is a form of protest against her son’s colonial allegiances, a protest that her son chooses not to notice. The Yakut costume in which his mother is dressed for burial displays heavy Russian influences, from the Russian kaftan that replaces the Sakha dress made of skins to the traditional silver necklaces now replete with Christian cross patterns. Yakut costume designer Ekaterina Shaposhnikova worked in close collaboration with Nadezhda Vasil’eva who had drawn on her extensive research of Sakha national dress for Aleksei Balabanov’s unfinished film about Yakutia, The River (Reka, 2002), also based on Sieroszewski’s writings. The song that a local bard sings at the funeral tells a story of the indigenous Tungus tribes who predated the Sakha in the area and had prospered on their bountiful land until the onset of “dark times.” The song provides the context for Keremes’ appeals to Khabdji to flee to the migratory Tungus while at the same time suggesting that this last refuge of freedom no longer exists.
Overall, Vladimir Munkuev’s complex investigation into Russian colonial processes in Nuuccha is discerning and enlightening. Occasional incongruities in character construction do not detract from but, in fact, add to a better understanding of all the contradictions and complexities inherent in this politically sensitive topic that is little explored in Russian cinema. In the director’s own words, “We went on such an adventure making this film, but somehow everyone believed in it, and it happened, and we were recognized for it. […] It must mean something, I don’t know what. The spirits will figure it out (dukhi razberutsia)” (Anon 2021a).
Elena Monastireva-Ansdell,
Colby College
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Works Cited
Anon. 2021a. “Interv’iu Vladimir Munkuev: iakutskoe kino, “Nuuchcha,” Gilev i Balabanov. YouTube KINOTV, September 30.
Anon. 2021b. “Vladimir Munkuev.” An interview. Kinotavr Daily 2, September 20.
Kuvshinova, Mariia. 2014. “Ne videl ni odnogo iakuta, kotoryi voobshche ne zanimalsia by tvorchestvom.” An interview with Mikhail Lukachevsky. Seans, August 22.
Nuuccha, Sakha (RF), 2021
Color, 107 minutes
Genre: Drama
Language: Sakha, Russian
Director: Vladimir Munkuev
Script: Vladimir Munkuev, based on a short story by Waclaw Sieroszewski
Cinematography: Denis Klebleev
Production Design: Roman Arutyunyan
Costumes: Ekaterina Shaposhnikova, Nadezhda Vasil’eva
Cast: Pavel Kolesov, Irina Mikhailova, Sergei Gilev, Innokentii Lukovtsev
Producers: Valerii Fedorovich, Evgenii Nikishov, Aleksandr Plotnikov, Boris Khlebnikov, Al’bert Riabyshev, Andrei Ushatsky, Anna Tikhonova, Anastasiia Kulikova
Production: Look Film, Mesto Sily, R-Media
Vladimir Munkuev’s Nuuccha (Sakha, 2021) reviewed by Elena Monastireva-Ansdell © 2022 |