Issue 81 (2023) |
Anastasiia Nechaeva: Velga (2022) reviewed by Seth Graham © 2023 |
Velga is a young woman living in a small fishing village on the White Sea coast of Russia’s Kola Peninsula, just below the Arctic Circle. She lives with her grieving father, who still writes letters to his wife three years after her death. Velga is in love with her childhood friend, Kirill, and just as their relationship seems to be evolving towards romance, Velga’s sister Snega (Snow) arrives in the village for a visit on the anniversary of their mother’s death. Snega is older than Velga, and as a professional ballet dancer who has been living in the city for some time, she is far more worldly, as indicated by her modern clothes, her makeup, and her penchant for using a type of sarcasm that Velga and her peer group do not. Snega quickly catches Kirill’s eye, and vice versa, to Velga’s dismay. The tempestuousness of the love triangle that dominates the rest of the film’s plot is literalized in the third act, when the stormy sea reasserts its omnipotence over the lives of those living next to it, and at its mercy.
Velga is director Anastasiia Nechaeva’s feature debut, and is an adaptation of Ivan Bunin’s eponymous 1895 children’s story. The film takes its tagline from the first words of the story: “Do you hear how plaintively the seagull cries over the clamorous, agitated sea?” As described in a 1971 review of the first published English translation of “Velga,” Bunin’s tale is based on
a legendary explanation of the cry of the seagull. It derives from folklore; a record of prehistory, recapitulated in the development of every child, when shapes do not hold, and humans and animals exchange identities. In that universe, nothing seems sure—neither life nor love. (Nissenson 1971)
I
n her film, Nechaeva draws directly on the fabular, mythic imagery in Bunin’s story—a girl whose close connection to the natural world allows her to save her beloved from a sudden manifestation of that world’s unpredictable cruelty, but only at the literal cost of her “hold” on the delicate balance between her human and animal essences. Velga’s privileged unity with the sea, sand, sky, and forests is frequently underscored on the film’s visual plane; many of the scenes end with a wordless, often slow-motion shot of her, eyes closed, moving along or standing on the shore as the tide comes in, or arms outstretched amidst the wind-touched tall trees as the camera moves around her. Nechaeva and cinematographers Artem Emelianov and Leonid Nikiforenko take full advantage of the stunning northern locations in these shots, which are also enhanced by Anton Silaev’s ethereal, contemplative score. It is on this, stylistic level that the adaptation seems closest to its literary inspiration, given Nechaeva’s choice to make her film’s diegesis more realistic and contemporary than Bunin’s fable.
The film also explores the theme of youth as a state of sublime uncertainty and possibility in which “shapes do not hold” and “nothing seems sure.” In addition to the tribulations of traversing the boundary between childhood and adulthood, Velga and her friends are constantly aware that they must make a choice between leaving “for the city” or remaining in their northern birthplace with its comforting unchangeability, simplicity, and natural splendor. When one of the group announces that he will be leaving, he is affectionately mocked by the others, although they are all aware of the allure of the wider world, especially Kirill, enchanted by that world’s implicit emissary, Snega.
If the young people are faced with the choice to stay or leave, the older characters are defined by their having experienced both life in the village and outside of it. Some are aware of the limitations of both worlds, and feel they have no third option other than suicide, like the retired judge whose rifle serves as the Chekhovian gun in more than one of the film’s subplots. Velga and Snega’s father, who had spent his career at sea as a sailor, seems consumed by a resigned melancholy that is only partly caused by his lingering grief over his dead wife.
Spirituality and religion are represented as personal and local. The only crosses in the village are the grave markers. There is a wishing tree with hundreds of colored ribbons, to which Velga turns in her desperation over losing Kirill to Snega. Velga and others regularly go to the local shaman, who herself is grieving her daughter, who drowned in the sea.
The northern Russian setting with its breath-taking natural vistas, as well as the depiction of a love triangle, evokes Andrei Zviagintsev’s celebrated Leviathan (2014), albeit with no sign at all of the clear political allegory of that film. The motif of the complex emotional lives of a small group of people living in an isolated maritime community is also reminiscent of Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).
Filming began in 2019 but was interrupted for two years due to the pandemic, and Nechaeva’s pregnancy (Kuznetsova 2022). Despite such a potentially disastrous interruption of the production process, the resulting film is coherent in its simple and timeless vision, and the actors were able to adeptly and seamlessly slip back into their roles.
Seth Graham
University College London
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Works Cited
Kuznetsova, Varvara. 2022. “V murmanskoe serdtse ne vlezesh’.” (Review of Velga). Chetvertaia stena 26 October.
Nissenson, Hugh. 1971. Review of ‘Velga’ by Ivan Bunin, transl. from the Russian by Guy Daniels, in New York Times Book Review 31 January (p. 26).
Velga, Russia, 2022
Color, 84 minutes, in Russian
Director: Anastasiia Nechaeva
Scriptwriter: Mariia Pavlovich
DoP: Artem Emelianov, Leonid Nikiforenko
Composer: Anton Silaev
Cast: Ol’ga Bodrova (Velga); Aleksei Gus’kov (Velga’s father); Anton Fedoseev (Kirill); Aleksandra Tulinova (Snega); Evgeniia Mangadzhieva (the shaman); Sergei Shakurov (the judge)
Production: Studiia Avtor
Anastasiia Nechaeva: Velga (2022) reviewed by Seth Graham © 2023 |