Issue 81 (2023) |
Dmitrii Suvorov: The One (Odna, 2022) reviewed by Alexander Prokhorov © 2023 |
Dmitrii Suvorov’s disaster-adventure film, The One,is based on a real event—a 1981 air accident over the Amur region in the Soviet Union’s Far East, when a passenger plane, Antonov 24, and a military plane, Tupolev 16, collided, killing 37 people. Only one person, Larisa Savitskaia, survived the collision and spent two and half days in the taiga before being found by the rescue team. The film starts with Larisa and her husband Volodia boarding the fateful flight. They are going on their honeymoon vacation, and everyone is in high spirits. The plane takes off, and some time later passengers see another plane passing close by. They assume that it was a near miss, but then the civilian plane starts falling. A military plane (apparently, there were two military planes) collided with the commercial one. Everything happens so quickly that nobody understands what caused the disaster. A spectacular montage sequence of the plane falling apart in mid-air follows, and it is perhaps the major attraction of the film.
The air disaster scene cuts to the title The One, whichappears against a black background, and the rest of the film tells the story of Larisa trying to stay alive in the Far-Eastern taiga. As in any disaster film, the lead character has to overcome challenges. I counted seven or perhaps eight major ones: Larisa removing a huge piece of duralumin from her leg without anesthesia, an encounter with an Amur tiger, almost drowning in a swamp, escaping the same or another tiger in a spectacular chase scene, climbing a cliff, crossing a mountain river, another chase scene, and almost freezing to death in a rainy forest. While the action takes place in the summer-time taiga, it gives a cold welcome to Larisa.
In a disaster film, extreme situations and near-death experiences typically reveal the true nature of characters. The weak fail to live up to the challenges, while the lead character perseveres no matter what. In The One, the plot follows familiar gender binaries. We have a strong male lead Volodia and a less strong female lead Larisa. She constantly tries to give up when confronted with insurmountable obstacles, though unfortunately Volodia already died at the beginning of the film. But cinema can do miracles via flashbacks by connecting the living with the dead. When Larisa regains consciousness in the midst of the Far-Eastern forest, she recollects her experiences with Volodia teaching her how to live in the wilderness while hiking together. At times Volodia appears to Larisa when she suffers from hallucinations, or to be more precise, patriarchy-induced hallucinations.
I would argue that the film’s narrative undercuts Larisa’s agency and her ability to overcome the obstacles on her own. Is she really alone in the taiga? She survives only thanks to the skills that she learned from her man. Volodia is next to Larisa in her visions and in flashbacks. Her “helicopter husband” taught her everything: to hike, to find directions in the forest, to make a DIY compass out of objects of clothing and things found in the wilderness, to start a campfire deep in the thicket. When she forgets or starts giving up, he either appears in her memories or as a ghost guiding her in her travel through the forest. Moreover, we learn earlier in the film in a foreshadowing episode that Volodia rescues Larisa when she is considering committing suicide by jumping off the roof of the building after failing entrance exams at Moscow University. Not surprisingly, when she ends up alone in taiga, she applies what she retained from her male mentor.
As is appropriate for a melodrama, coincidences of a miraculous nature are ample in the film. From beyond the grave Volodia is trying to rescue his beloved. When she is on the brink of despair and decides to commit suicide the second time, she discovers Volodia’s backpack with his drawings of them together. His art inspires her to continue fighting for her life and overcoming hostile elements. The miraculous backpack contains other things useful for surviving in the freezing forest.
Structurally, the film is uneven. The first thirty minutes are very promising, developing several connected plot lines: Larisa and Volodia boarding the plane, the exchanges between air traffic controllers and pilots, Larisa’s flashback/vision of her life with Volodia, and the Soviet authorities’ attempt to hide the disaster from the relatives of the passengers. The authorities immediately close down the town of Zavitinsk, over which the collision took place, and order telegrams to be sent to relatives telling them that there was an unspecified automobile accident. Human tragedy and the government cover-up—these two narrative lines would have made The One a much more rounded and suspenseful story. As an unnamed general informs KGB Major Kniazev, who will investigate the accident, the former is only concerned with the destroyed military plane and the failed test launch of a ballistic missile. When Larisa’s and Volodia’s mothers try to find the truth and get into the town, the local official lies about an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. For a film based on a true story this material is as good as gold: after all, it is a well-known fact that Soviet authorities never made air disasters public knowledge.
But this promising line goes nowhere. Kniazev half-heartedly interrogates a military pilot who participated in the exercises and who mourns only his fallen comrades. Lesson learned: nobody is guilty, the instructions were simply wrong. Kniazev and local authorities fly a helicopter to the crash area. They do it twice: once Kniazev refuses to look for survivors but then learns from the people and agrees to land. Second lesson learned: not all orders are right. As usual in many recent Russian conflict-less retro films, there are no bad people, only (potentially) bad but spectacular tigers. All in all, The One feels like something was changed in the script mid-way through the film.
The only thing left to play with is the melodramatic mise-en-scene of the paradise lost, that is, late socialism. The One is part of an entire cluster of Russian films and TV series that nostalgically resurrect the material and audio culture of the 1970s and early 80s: haircuts, clothing items, interior designs, furniture, Eastern-block modernist architecture, automobiles of the era, desirable consumer goods in short supply, such as instant coffee, and of course music. The filmmaker even imitates the faded palette of Soviet color film stock from the 1970s. The intertextual links also evoke the Stagnation era. In a flashback episode, Volodia and Larisa go to a movie theater to watch a 1974 Italian film Miracles Still Happen (I miracoli accadono ancora, dir. Giuseppe Maria Scottese). The film had a similar subject—Juliane Koepcke survived a plane crash in the Peruvian rainforest and spent eleven days in the jungle before being saved by a rescue team—and was screened in the USSR. In fact, Savitskaia claims that she tried to behave during the fall out of the sky like the character in the film that she saw a year before the air accident (Afanasyenko).
Right after finding Volodia’s backpack, Larisa finds Volodia’s body, still in the plane seat. Larisa sits in Volodia’s lap, embraces him, and he temporarily comes back. Larisa says: “Kak dolgo ia tebia iskala!” (“How long did I look for you!)—a famous concluding line from Vladimir Men’shov’s Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears, the ultimate melodrama of the era. The nostalgic drive of the scene, however, has an aftertaste of horror. Love is there but it is tinged with death and reminiscent of another film with a quite different ideology—Aleksei Balabanov’s Cargo 200. If Suvorov’s film embraces nostalgia, Balabanov’s picture puts a nail in the coffin of the Putin-era celebration of the late socialist era. Pun intended.
Suvorov’s film includes several bonus features that try to compensate for a somewhat deflated original design. First, at the film's end, Larisa-the-character sees her husband again, alive on the ground, as the rescue helicopter is taking her away from taiga. Second, after the film ends and credits roll, the real Larisa tells the story of her last days with her husband. It is clear how hard it is for her to talk about this but the interviewer persists. Finally, as the credits continue to roll, we hear a hip-hop song by rap singer Basta, which he wrote specially for the film—an odd choice of musical style for a feature immersed in Soviet nostalgia. Suvorov’s film was produced with the support of the Kion subscription streaming service but also enjoyed a theatrical release and earned 2.2 million dollars in ticket sales. It is a modest but decent box office, probably due to the absence of Hollywood films in Russian movie theaters because Hollywood companies left Russia after Putin unleashed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The film might also be popular with the viewers because they can identify with a sole survivor amidst a never-ending disaster.
Alexander Prokhorov
College of William & Mary
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Works Cited
Afanasyenko, Yulia. 2023. “Larisa Savitskaya: The 5-km free fall survivor from the Far East.” Russia Beyond. 11 January.
The One , Russia, 2022
Color, 108 min
Director: Dmitrii Suvorov
Screenplay: Dmitrii Suvorov, Andrei Nazarov
DoP: Mikhail Kelim
Production Design: Iuliia Charandaeva
Cast: Nadezhda Kaleganova, Viktor Dobronravov, Maksim Ivanov, Anna Dubrovskaia, Mariia Sokova, Vladimir Vinogradov, Leonid Gromov
Producers: Andrei Liakhov, Anna Bochkareva, Dmitrii Suvorov, Anton Belov
Production: SSB Kino, KION Online (MTS), with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the RF
Release: 9 June 2022
Dmitrii Suvorov: The One (Odna, 2022) reviewed by Alexander Prokhorov © 2023 |