Issue 83 (2024) |
Dmitrii Davydov: Youth (Molodost'/Eder saas, Yakutia 2022) reviewed by Zhanna Budenkova © 2024 |
Describing the main message of Youth, Dmitrii Davydov explains that the film’s principal focus is the theme of nostalgia—nostalgia for the past, childhood and youth: “Nostalgia for youth is alive in us now more than ever, nostalgia for the time when life was easy and good. We believe that if we return there, everything will be the same. This film allows us to complete this nostalgic circle in order to understand that your present self can return to this nominal past, but you cannot reexperience it again” (Iakutiia Daily, 2022). The nostalgic impulse is, indeed, strong in Youth and embraces personal-existential, societal, and cinematographic dimensions. In the best traditions of Yakut films, it also touches upon the issue of origins—the origins of Sakha cinema.
In his elaboration of the theme of nostalgia in Youth, Davydov opts for a circular plot structure that highlights the motif of return. The film opens and closes in the same location – at a village disco, where the protagonist Vasilii spends his time both upon his arrival to the village and before his eventual departure from it. As the film unfolds, we discover that Vasilii grew up in the village, but left his rural home many years ago to reside in the city where he “chased good life,” but evidently failed. In various conversations between Vasilii and locals, the protagonist’s life crystallizes as a series of unfinished or interrupted events: after the mandatory military service in Khabarovsk, Vasilii trained to become a welder, but failed to finish his education; he was also married and has two children but ended up divorcing his wife and leaving the family in the city. The same interrupted logic marks Vasilii’s return to the village as well: after settling into an empty familial home (his parents have long passed away), he attempts to reconnect with his old childhood friends and extended family but faces rejection. Finally, after losing the house to arson, Vasilii departs from his native land and disappears in an unknown direction.
The theme of chasing of the intangible past is emphasized through the film’s visual language marked by multiple allusions to the ghostliness and immateriality of the unfolding events. In many scenes, the camera dwells on shadows produced by the characters’ bodies rather than on the bodies themselves. In one of the opening scenes, where Vasilii is shown arriving to his parents’ house, his body is not visible in the frame—instead, we see his huge, deformed shadow cast onto the house. In this scene, the sound of Vasilii’s voice is disembodied as well; it seems to belong to the shadow. In another sequence, when Vasilii visits his high school friend (and, possibly, flame) Vera and persuades her to dance with him, we see the shadows of the characters’ moving bodies cast onto the window curtain seen from the outside of the house. Narratively, the scene foregrounds the theme of nostalgia for the lost youth, when the characters enjoyed dancing together. Visually, it alludes to the immateriality of memory and the ghostliness of the cinematic image—the dance of shadows on the screen—as a form of recorded memory.
The film’s emphasis on dancing and music—at one point we hear twelve songs by the popular Yakut rock band Hardyy—complicates its genre classification. In his interview about the film, Davydov explained that Youth turned out to be a “rock musical” with some elements of drama and comedy. Commenting on the fusion of different genres in the film, Davydov describes his method as a synthesis of various genres that helps to produce desired effects (Iakutiia 24, 2022). Youth is not the only film by Davydov credited for genre fusion: discussing his award-winning Scarecrow (Pugalo, 2020), critics pointed at elements of various genres, including drama, thriller, and the horror genre as the film’s building blocks. The notion of the synthesis can be applied to Youth as well. The film’s genre eclecticism has a reflexive charge, commenting on the nature of the cinematic medium more generally, and on the cinema history in the Republic of Sakha.
Discussing Yakut cinema (of which he is one of the most renowned representatives), Davydov stresses the need for mutual recognition and support. In the last 30 years, the republic has developed its own distinct cinematic tradition privileging the use of Yakut language and focusing on local material, including folkloric themes and social preoccupations. Yakut cinema is referenced in Youth a number of times. During Vasilii’s visit to Vera, the friends are shown watching a locally shot horror movie featuring a Dracula-like vampire. Vera praises the film, proudly proclaiming that Yakuts started to make “wonderful films” recently, but Vasilii is more skeptical about the film and offers to switch to a different TV channel. The scene foregrounds the motif of Vasilii’s alienation from the village collective, which he rejected twenty years ago, by moving to the city. Vera accuses Vasilii of ignoring his schoolmates and skipping on his class gatherings, to which he responds that he is not interested in maintaining those ties. In the scene, the village collective alludes to the larger collectivity of the Yakut people, whose cultural products are not to Vasilii’s liking. The evocation of the Yakut horror genre in the film references cinema’s origins in the republic, which started off from horror films featuring Yakut mythological motifs—a good example is the short film Maapрa, made back in 1986 by the VGIK graduate Aleksei Romanov. The issue of origins is one of the topics that concerns Yakut cinematography since its inception, and Davydov’s film channels this preoccupation.
Apart from the discussion of the Sakha cinema tradition, in Youth, the filmmaker comments on the nature of the cinematic medium more generally. In several scenes, he reflects on film viewership and portrays the experience of film as a form of collective dreaming. In one episode focusing on the contents of Vasilii’s dream, we are shown a shimmering TV screen, which, in the general darkness of the room, is visually compared to a window that emerges as the camera continues to pan around the house. Through the window, we see several children playing in the snow, emphasizing the nostalgic logic of Vasilii’s experience in the village. In another dream sequence, cinema is presented as a form of magic through an allusion to spectatorial experience. In the scene, a group of Vasilii’s colleagues are shown watching a performance by a magician demonstrating various tricks with (dis)appearing objects. The scene emphasizes the notion of viewership: we observe the group watching the performance, as if they are looking at us: the film viewers. This spectatorial confrontation, which lasts for about a minute, points at the common experience of viewership on either side of the screen. The notion of cinema as a magic window into other people’s lives is highlighted in another sequence, where the village’s residents are shown inside their homes through windows that naturally look like frames of a film. In his interview about Youth, Davydov mentioned that he enjoyed observing other people’s lives through windows when he was a child. He references this experience in the film, which focuses on youth and childhood as a time of magic, which the filmmaker tries to reclaim through his art.
Zhanna Budenkova
University of Pittsburgh
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Works Cited
Iakutiia 24 (2022). “Pogovorim”: Rezhisser Dmitrii Davydov.
IakutiiaDaily (2022). “Dmitrii Davydov: ‘Molodost'’ – eto takaia svetlaia psikhoterapiia.” IakutiiaDaily 26 December.
Youth, Russia, 2022
Color, 88 minutes
Director: Dmitrii Davydov
Scriptwriter: Dmitrii Davydov
DoP: Nikolai Petrov
Production Design: Tamara Ivanova
Music: Andrei Gur'ianov
Cast: Al'bert Alekseev, Elena Markova, Anatolii Struchkov
Production: Bonfire
Dmitrii Davydov: Youth (Molodost'/Eder saas, Yakutia 2022) reviewed by Zhanna Budenkova © 2024 |