Reviews
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Reviews |
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Renata Litvinova, The Goddess [Boginia] (2004) reviewed by Seth Graham©2005 |
The
key is to not think of death as an end, but more as a very effective way to cut
down on your expenses.
—Woody Allen as Boris Grushenko in Love
and Death
(1975)
Known for her ethereal voice, stream-of-consciousness language, and
retro blonde glamour, Renata Litvinova has been something of a mass-media icon
for over a decade thanks to her roles in several films by Kira Muratova and her
frequent television appearances, often as a fashion commentator.
She is also a VGIK-trained screenwriter, and has written or co-written a
handful of feature films, most memorably Valerii Todorovskii’s Land of the
Deaf (Strana glukhikh, 1998), based on her novella To Possess and
Belong (Obladat' i prinadlezhat').
She recently established an international presence with her role in Peter
Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part Three: From Sark to Finish
(2003). The Goddess is
Litvinova’s debut as a director of acted cinema, and it showcases all of these
personae—writer, actress, cult figure, Muratova protégée—in ways that
illustrate both the drawbacks and advantages of being one’s own muse.
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Litvinova directs herself as Faina, a Moscow detective investigating the
disappearance of a little girl. Despite
narrative and stylistic nods to detective noir in the first half, however, the
investigation is ultimately incidental to the film.
Already considered eccentric by her police colleagues, Faina grows less
and less interested in making sense of empirical reality and becomes
increasingly absorbed by the otherworldliness represented by looking glasses and
dreams (mostly of her dead mother, played by Svetlana Svetlichnaia, a legendary
Soviet femme fatale in her own right, from Leonid Gaidai’s film Diamond
Arm [Brilliantovaia
ruka, 1968]).
Litvinova finally abandons the crime genre completely in favor of what
might be termed decadent surrealism, an impressionistic visual and verbal
infatuation with death and love.
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Death dominates Faina’s consciousness, and therefore the diegesis,
both metaphorically and metonymically. Litvinova’s
skill as a screenwriter is most apparent in the variety of ways she manages to
combine death and her other theme, love, in single images or events.
An ominous black raven leaves a row of dead fish on Faina’s windowsill,
the way a pet brings trophy kills to its beloved owner.
Her mother and the other denizens of the afterlife who populate her
dreams lovingly encourage her to embrace death without fear.
A woman in a cafeteria describes the details of her own will, emphasizing
her imminent death not as a tragedy, but an act of devotion to her sister, the
beneficiary. Faina encounters a
near-suicide, a suicide, a double suicide, and a professor able to visit the
realm of the dead via intravenous drugs and antique mirrors.
This last encounter allows Faina (and Litvinova the writer/director) to
complete her trajectory towards exclusive obsession with love and death or, more
precisely, with death as the key to understanding and achieving love, an emotion
and a concept that Faina admits has always escaped her.
| Litvinova’s take on her central theme, like her fashion sense, is
retro, a decadent aestheticization of death that differs not only from
Muratova’s own thanatological triptych, Three Stories (Tri istorii,
1997), but also from the naturalistic, matter-of-fact mortal images of numerous
post-censorship Russian chernukha films. The Goddess also stands in contrast to Timur
Bekmambetov’s recent Russian horror-fantasy film, Night Watch (Nochnoi
dozor, 2004), a work of popular genre cinema against the backdrop of which
Litvinova’s film (whose special-effects ravens cite Bekmambetov’s) appears
all the more auteurist. The
influence of Muratova, her mentor in this regard, is palpable on multiple
levels. Faina herself, and the bomzh
Doppelgänger who holds her place in the living world during her sojourn in
the realm of the dead, amounts to a distillation of Litvinova’s previous
screen personae in Muratova’s Passions (Uvlechen'ia, 1994), Three Stories, and The Tuner (Nastroishchik,
2004). As the demiurge of this
world, Litvinova has imbued even the supporting characters in The Goddess with
recognizable elements of her own image, especially Faina’s mother, who wears
Ofa’s red dress from Three Stories.
Other Muratovian touches include the use of still-life or slow-motion
shots of urban detritus (dirty dolls, the dead fish) and frequent bits of
repetitive, incantation-like dialogue (“When I die, will you cry?”) uttered
by characters with a surplus of affect. Faina,
by contrast, is emotionally distant; the father of the missing girl tells her
she has “cold eyes.” The
heroine’s inability to connect with other people is, in fact, emblematic of
the film’s major flaw: its relentless focus on Faina/Litvinova to the
detriment not only of the rest of the stellar cast, but also of the more
abstract thematic and emotional aspirations of the script that could not be
embodied in Litvinova’s own iconic image. |
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The title of the film acknowledges its multiple mythological and
metaphysical allusions, and also evokes Litvinova’s directorial debut, the
documentary For Me There is No Death (Net smerti dlia menia,
2000), in which she demonstrated an
interest in a different type of deity: the screen goddess (the film is a
series of interviews with leading Soviet actresses including Tat'iana Samoilova
and Nonna Mordiukova). Litvinova’s
fascination with the actress as icon, and her self-cultivation since the
early-1990s as one of the most distinctive and compelling screen presences of
her generation, result in an imbalance in The Goddess.
All of the love-and-death-related mythemes evoked in the film are
ultimately absorbed into the sheer visual and oral/aural centrality of Litvinova/Faina,
who is not only both Orpheus and Eurydice in this story of traversing the
boundary between life and death, but also Narcissus. |
Seth Graham, Stanford University
The
Goddess: How I Fell in Love [Boginia:
Kak ia poliubila] (Russia, 2004)
Color,
101 minutes.
Directed:
Renata Litvinova.
Script:
Renata Litvinova
Cinematography:
Vladislav Opeliants.
Production
Design: Ekaterina Zaletaeva.
Costumes:
Natal'ia Ivanova.
Music:
Igor Vdovin, Zemfira Ramazanova, Nick Cave.
Cast:
Renata Litvinova, Svetlana Svetlichnaia, Viktor Sukhorukov, Maksim Sukhanov,
Andrei Krasko, Elena Rufanova, Konstantin Khabenskii, Konstantin Murzenko,
Kseniia Kachalina.
Producers: Elena Iatsura, Renata Litvinova, and Sergei Melkumov
Production: Bogvud kino and Slovo Productions.
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Renata Litvinova, The Goddess [Boginia] (2004) reviewed by Seth Graham©2005 |
15/04/05
