KinoKultura: Issue 78 (2022) |
In Moscow, the 44th International Film Festival (MIFF) took place from 26 August–2 September 2022 amidst political and cultural isolation. Along with a number of filmmakers, FIPRESCI ignored the festival, while a NETPAC jury honored Moscow with its presence. The line of journalists queuing for accreditation badges usually winds along the Arbat, in any weather, to the entrance of the October Cinema where the festival traditionally takes place. This year, the members of the press gathered in small flocks and hastily hid their badges away. The general atmosphere of the festival reminded me mostly of the prose of the late Terry Pratchett: the accredited press of the festival reasonably did not ask, neither at Q&A nor in any lobby, why both in the main competition and in other programs, half of the films were debuts and the other half should never have been shown at a festival in the first place. The administration that has invited the press could, of course, not answer these unasked questions. (And why? Because Lord Vetinari did not appoint Moist von Lipwig as Postmaster General of the Festival.)
So, besides isolation and the loss of the A-class status, MIFF had seen an expected reshuffle among the organizers: Kirill Razlogov had passed in 2021, and cult selectors Andrei Plakhov and Petr Shepotinnik had left. However, some symbols of the festival remained, where, as with wine, over the years the taste becomes even more refined. Nikita Mikhalkov solemnly opened the festival, raising his hands in greeting with no less than ten rings flashing. By the way, about precious metals and stones: the jewelry company Mercury traditionally made (no, not the Ring of Absolute Power) the prizes in all nominations.
Russian films at the festival were presented mainly in two programs: the main competition and the Russian Premiers competition. Escapism, the attempt to avoid statements about modern Russia during the times of the special operation, were a key strategy of Russian filmmakers. There were two ways at the festival to avoid the expression of the mournful reality. On the one hand, to address the subject of the Russian village or the Russian provinces; and, on the other hand, to research man in internal, spiritual (self)-isolation.
Larisa Sadilova has for a long time already fruitfully worked on the subject of Russia’s remote regions. Her penultimate picture Once in Trubchevsk (Odnazhdy v Trubchevske, 2019) won a prize at the Cannes film festival in Un Certain Regard. The small cities and settlements in different directions from Moscow, but usually no closer than 100–200 km, are the Sadilova’s favorite space. The provinces and provincial people are almost always the subject of a fixed interest in her films: she loves the slow life away from the capital where there is no motor traffic, neither deadlines nor time-management, neither career nor multitasking, and people have no dealings with the central power, in the same way as the central power has little time for them. But this is how the whole of Russia lives. Sadilova is fascinated by the people in such small cities: their problems at work, family dramas, household chaos, simple things; but whence come no less intense feelings and, most importantly, they show sincerity. The director’s style is a quiet, slow story-telling with a set of everyday details (evil tongues quite often compare this style to Russian soap operas), yet more than pertinent to tell the story and show another, contemporary Russia.
Typically for Sadilova, the charm of her new film Kitchen Garden (Ogorod) is not in the story or the intrigue, but in the process: the life of the characters, their adaptation to given, often rather unexpected circumstances. The main character Zoya (Valentina Telichkina) lives in Bryansk, a big city by provincial standards, in one apartment together with her sister Ella (Ol’ga Lapshina). Both are not young, both have been widowed, their children have grown up and work in Moscow (Zoya has two sons who work in construction, while Ella’s daughter is a manicurist). Their time—of which the ladies from Bryansk have plenty—is whiled away, everyone in their own way. Ella watches soap operas (yes, these senseless series, infinite in number, to which Sadilova’s films have been compared); Zoya regularly goes to the kitchen garden. Indeed, the theme of the dacha, or a kitchen garden, is most important for Russian city dwellers (of course, it comes after the raising of the flag and singing the anthem a cappella in the morning from the balcony), and it is a source of inspiration, peace of mind, favorite entertainment, and almost the only way to get closer to nature. Actually, it is the embodiment of citizens, first Soviet and then Russian, of the public ideal about which Enlightenment philosophers have written so much, above all Jean-Jacques Rousseau: back to nature!
However, the kitchen garden still has its role to play. Zoya’s story begins not in the kitchen garden, but in a rest house for heart patients (i.e., with a disease of the cardiovascular system), where she begins a stormy love affair with Valerii (a conferencier from Kursk, who works in the local recreation center and during city events). A stormy affair, of course, by traditional Soviet standards begins during the winter season. They go together for their treatment and to the dining room, but as soon as Valerii is bold enough to end the Platonic phase of their relationship, everything changes. Zoya (as well as her sister and three quarters of Russian women over 60) has not enough courage and relaxedness to see herself as a woman at her age. Alas, this is a sad line not just of Soviet, but rather national culture: insufficient self-esteem. And where should this love come from? Self-love appears where a stable, social system has been created over years, with a salaries, pensions, and opportunities to spend leisure-time in a civilized way, to drive children to school, and where institutes and schools speak about women’s freedom and dignity. Zoya raised her two sons alone in Bryansk, at the beginning of the 2000s; they completed school and settled in Moscow. That means that Zoya cannot be broken by Russian or anti-Russian propaganda; she will stand against Russian reforms, and against sanctions, but she will always find time for her favorite kitchen garden. Without hesitating for a second, she chooses between Valerii and the kitchen garden, in favor of the latter.
Sadilova shows again her skill in directing, gently sneering at the small weaknesses of provincial inhabitants through unpretentious musical addictions (there is a lot of popular music in the episodes—something long out of fashion; but there are also Soviet patriotic songs which never go out of fashion in Russia). The modern situation during the “special operation” is assessed quite unambiguously. Zoya sometimes has quite entertaining dreams, which in their absurdity could easily compete with the art of Salvatore Dali or René Magritte: ladies dressed in red and wearing dark glasses, picturesquely scattered fruit, conversations about a global plot, espionage recruitment, and so on. Sadilova also touches upon the hurrah-patriotism taken out of a dusty storeroom and the country’s militarization: when Zoya calls on the neighbor in the village, she sees that her log hut is covered with army camouflage suits, and the neighbor sits at the sewing machine. To Zoya’s question where and why there is a lot of this, the neighbor answers: “Now only camouflage is being ordered!” From the city to the village, where Zoya has the kitchen garden, an old bus goes once a day, and on the trip the locals discuss all sorts of things. One of the women, for example, is distressed that her daughter stopped visiting her and adds: “It’s all because of NATO and eastern expansion.” Sadilova’s style and concept have reached an apogee: this film is no longer just a provincial story, but more likely a metaphor of modern Russia, which from time to time does not distinguish its own kitchen garden from the neighbor’s kitchen garden—and, after all, who hasn’t done that?
In the last couple of years, and especially since the loud victory of Eduard Novikov’s Lord Eagle (Tsar-ptitsa, 2018), Yakutia has been well represented at MIFF. Thanks to the geographical isolation and rich cultural history, the culture of Yakutia in cinema is equally interesting both for Russian and foreign audiences. The general recession in the film and festival business in Russia has affected, apparently, also the quality of the latest film by Dmitrii Davydov (previously known for Bonfire [Koster na vetru, 2000] and Pugalo, 2000), which is titled Youth (Molodost’). This time, the director has relied not on the richness of Yakut nature or the specificity of Yakut culture, but concentrated on a topic quite traditional for Russian, and Soviet, cinema: the conflict between city and countryside. Or rather, the film just mentions the city, whence a bus brings the protagonist Stepan. In the finale, the same bus takes him back to the city. From Davydov’s film one may draw quite sad conclusions: the village in Yakutia reminds us more of a village in the films of Sergei Loznitsa, Sergei Dvortsevoi or Pavel Kostomarov of the early 2000s. There is a sad, monotonous life; people work somewhere, they are dressed without looking shabby; they go to a local bar where they eat properly and drink much, mostly vodka with Coca-Cola. There are hardly any precise locations in the film: the bar, a couple of houses, a boiler room, and that’s about it.
Stepan returns to his native village after having left a long time ago; he returns the house where his parents lived and where they waited for him. Now his parents have died, and Stepan settles in the cold, deserted house. In order for the film to correspond even more to the habitual “Yakut style,” Davydov exaggerates: Stepan works as a stoker. A gloomy boiler room with heaps of coal into which the protagonist digs day after day remind us of Aleksei Balabanov’s The Stoker (Kochegar, 2010). Maybe Davydov did not set himself the task to contrast city and village, as much as he did not set out to juxtapose Stepan to the locals; and he did not try to show (in the best Soviet or Hollywood tradition) the evolution of the hero. Stepan, it seems, attempts to develop and adapt: he repairs the house, tries to re-establish friendly communication with the locals. But the house is set on fire; his former school friends have all grown up, they have their own families, and there is no place in their lives for Stepan. It is unlikely that Davydov planned the film as a social drama; most likely, he wanted to play out the locations already familiar to the festival viewer, the setting and characters. However, this precisely is the main problem for Youth, which contains too much cliche, too much “Yakut,” which runs from one film to another not only in Davydov’s work, but also in that of other Yakut filmmakers.
Inner self-isolation vs. self-isolation inside
Almost all the films of the program “Russian Premiers” were devoted to another key theme of the festival: inner self-isolation, the loneliness of man separated from the world or a man from whom the world has turned away. The ethnic theme, even if drawn from rather different material, is presented in the film Mikulai by director Ilshat Rakhimbai (Imagine [Predstav’, 2017]). The film is a monodrama, a stream-of-consciousness of an elderly person, the last inhabitant of a village that is now deserted. The man reflects on his childhood, his youth, his friends and neighbors who have gone to the city for good. The action unfolds in the village of Kryashens, an ethno-confessional group of Tatars who speak the Tatar language but profess Orthodoxy (for Russia, not the most fulminant mix of multiculturalism). For the sake of spectacle, the film was shot in the genre of a thriller; only at the end we learn that all the characters and events are unreal, that they occur in the consciousness of the main character, the old man Mikulai. The title role was played perfectly by Viktor Sukhorukov, who brought his eccentric manner into the role. In his performance, Mikulai teeters on the brink madness (though he is, of course, mad), and veers between child, teenager and old man. The film contains a lot of ethnographic material: national costumes, songs, and folklore. The project could become a good decoration for any international film festival.
The theme of a man captivated by his own reason is presented in the film A Similar Person (Pokhozhii chelovek) by Semen Serzin, who clearly showed an understanding of Russia as a frightening, infernal world in his previous film, The Man from Podolsk (Chelovek iz Podolska, 2020), in which the consciousness of an ordinary man is split, and eventually he is not able to return to reality, unable to stick back together the splinters of his inner world. As a matter of fact, the idea is not new: most classical Russian literature of the 19th century (Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Fedor Dostoevsky) and later in the 20th century of Mikhail Bulgakov, is constructed on phantasmagoric images: the little man and the machine of power and authority, which ruthlessly pressurizes him with its huge weight. In the new film, A Similar Person, Serzin plays the lead role of a criminal investigator, who works on the case of a suicide of a person who jumped out of a window. As he asks witnesses about the dead man, it seems to him that he is leading a double life. On the one hand, he is an investigator, leading a sad life with his police habits; and on the other, he is a fiction writer who is very rich and well-known, but who is completely losing the connection with reality.
Serzin strengthens the effect of déja vu and makes the film in monochrome; therefore, the picture reminds us at once of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 1961), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and Aleksei German’s Khrustalev, My Car! (Khrustalev, mashinu!, 1998). A large part of the film is shot with a Steadicam, which follows the hero everywhere. This creates a certain claustrophobic space, in which there literally is no air to breathe and nothing to attract the gaze. The outcome is quite predictable: the persuasive hallucination where the investigator each time tries, but cannot see the face of the dead person, comes to an end with a revelation: he and the suicide are the same person. However, the message of this film, unlike The Man from Podolsk, is much more abstract: not incidentally, A Similar Man begins with a series of shots of the dirty, gloomy high-rises, the typical suburbs of Moscow and Vladivostok. The author speaks a voice-over text that, despite the horror of life, he chooses to live.
Vitalii Suslin’s new film Camel Way (Verbluizh’ia duga) also deals with a lonely man, who is lost in memories of his happy, distant childhood and in his own imagination. The director continues to expand his universe, which he reproduces in many of his films: children’s memories, fairy-tale and bible motifs, circus and theater, horses, camels and lyrical music that makes the female audience weep. Among his heroes are shepherds, shoemakers, musicians, actors, security guards, collectors, police officers and bandits. The first frame of the film shows Aleksandr Karnaushkin, one of Suslin’s constant actors, with a butterfly net and a wooden horse; he is walking in the woods, imagining himself as a little boy. Yet this is not the story about a courageous fight against Alzheimer’s: the hero is an ordinary dreamer, who has a wife and an adult son. He is a shoemaker but, having come home from work, he regularly locks himself in the toilet and writes verses. Generally, the idea of the film is clear from the first shot, but the director intensifies the conflict as much as possible, making a number of tragic mistakes: he follows a path of cliches. The dreamer has (naturally!) a quarrelsome and not very poetic wife (Elena Gladysheva), who constantly nags him and brings him back to the sad reality. However, the spouse works most of all in the family: even if she is, of course, not a poet, she is a musician and teaches the accordion not only at school, but she also gives private lessons at home. She loves and appreciates ballet. Therefore, when he gives her a mask for scuba diving for New Year (a hint at the imminent trip to Egypt), she gives him two tickets for The Nutcracker. Probably, her persistent work gives him a chance not to burden himself too much with work (he appears infrequently in the shoe shop) and to do his favorite thing: fantasize. Their son, who does not live with them, appears from time to time to draw the father aside and bring him down from the stars to earth.
The plot has no special value, because such films are shot not for the sake of the story; instead, the main concern is the atmosphere: the gentle music off-screen, the New Year, a fir-tree, old glass toys (with a link to childhood), a rare Bible in which the shoemaker reads for the first time (!) in his life the story about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea (this is in Russia in the 2020s, where Orthodoxy and the state have long lived in a civil marriage, even if hitherto unwritten?!).
Such a plot could be constructed in the setting of any country, not only Russia, where the world of imagination and memories locks out reality. Probably such cinema is necessary here and now to endure the asthenic syndrome, the narcolepsy into which the country has fallen, despite—as they say in the news—fast-rising patriotism, the belief in the bright future, and the victory over global fascism.
Translated by Birgit Beumers
Maksim Kazyuchits
Moscow
Maksim Kazyuchits © 2022
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