Issue 83 (2024) |
Yulia Trofimova: The Land of Sasha (Strana Sasha, 2022) reviewed by Birgit Beumers © 2024 |
The Land of Sasha celebrated its premiere at the Berlinale 2022, in the competition Generation 14+ that presents youth films. It is a debut film by Yulia Trofimova, a graduate from the New York Film Academy (scriptwriting) and the Moscow Film School (directing), adapted from the youth novel by writer, poet, photographer, and multi-media artist Gala Uzryutova, written in 2009 and published in 2019. The story is of growing-up and first love, hence the slot in the Berlinale’s youth program.
As the film’s title suggests, we are in a land named “Sasha:” this is his version about coming-of-age, as Sasha (Mark Eidel’shtein) lives with his single mum Sonya (Evgeniia Gromova) in Kaliningrad. Sonya is a very young mother: she likely had Sasha very young, as a teenager who might then have fallen for the confident rock musician Igor Bystrov. Sonya is, therefore, as much growing up as is her son, and many of her motherly antics stand in contrast to the relationship with her son that resembles friendship more than parental control (or even guidance)—certainly an unusual template for Russia’s state-prescribed notion of “family relations.” Thus, the worried mother, she wants Sasha to enroll at university and is quite pushy. Sasha has just finished school and he needs some more time to make up his mind what he wants to do: he is friends with a graffiti artist, Max, who is a little older; and he likes drawing and painting. So, for a start he finds a paid job to design a wall in the waiting room of the children’s psychiatrist in the hospital, where he meets Zhenya. She emerges from the psychiatrist’s treatment room and claims she has been advised to talk to people at random so as to overcome her social fears. Sasha and Zhenya have in common artistic-creative interests (designing clothes), and become friends. But eventually they need to make their own decisions, both.
A film about growing up, the story concerns not only the 17-year-old responsible Sasha: The film opens with him leaving a graduation party with his schoolmates in the early hours of the morning as they continue drinking in a children’s playground. He leaves this “children’s” space, more mature than the others, or so it seems; when he comes home, a worried mum is asleep on the couch, but it is he who reminds her not to drink (she has finished a bottle of wine), or later, not to smoke; he cares about his friends and helps, often giving rather than getting advice. He is mature in his comportment, but at home in his room he plays—with gadgets, toys, colors; he needs time (something like a gap year) to make up his mind whether he wants to turn his hobby into a career.
This is Sasha’s land (literally, the film’s title means “the land named Sasha”), and the story is told from his perspective. After the opening sequence, there is an episode in which Sasha speaks about himself, looking at the camera; he tells the viewer that he is popular among his classmates, a reliable friend, often asked about his views on fashion, even by the girls, and that although he wears an earring, he is not gay—but beyond that, he has no idea about his self. Thus, the character of Zhenya (and her family) remains limited in scope and the viewer learns much less about her; indeed, what she says is not always true. Sasha takes on trust the story Zhenya tells him about her psychiatrist suggesting she should and talk to the first person she meets; the fact that she follows this advice instantly is indeed put into doubt when she speaks non-stop without giving Sasha a chance to get a word in. Learning from her later that this story was not true, he has reason to doubt also her claim that she cannot do heights—but this time she told him the truth. Sasha, in turn, also makes up a story when he gifts her a bouquet of flowers, claiming he bought it off some old ladies; Zhenya instantly discloses this as a lie, identifying the wrapping paper. Sasha is openly playful with lies that serve less to cover but disguise the truth, while we never get to the bottom of Zhenya’s motivations. However, Sasha fails at gauging her true condition: when he asks her to his home to introduce her to Sonya, he involuntarily exposes her to his mother’s routine “motherly” questions about her plans for the future (those same nagging questions he bounces off playfully). Even though the film presents Sasha as more mature than his mother in everyday life (don’t smoke, don’t drink, let me talk to dad), he gradually learns life lessons: his mother takes off with his best friend Max, he meets Bystrov and finds out that his dad is not at all easy to get along with, and he learns that mum was right when she asked him to make up his mind for his future—it is not only what mums do, but what women do, including Liza, his best friend from school, and his love interest Zhenya. From their view, Sasha is immature and irresponsible, but it is from his view that we follow the story of someone who considers himself quite “adult.” This split perspective on the main character is brought out in the final scene, when Sasha does follow Zhenya to Moscow to find that she is doing just fine—and it is something the film might have emphasized more through a more complex narrative structure.
Indeed, Zhenya, whose “diagnosis” (if there is one) is never disclosed, is maybe the strongest character in the story—based, after all, on a text from a female author and directed by a woman filmmaker. In the film, the men are peripheral: Uncle Roman seeks, but cannot give advice to Sasha; Sasha’s father Igor Bystrov has strong views on music and little self-esteem—and shows little interest in his son; his older friend, the graffiti artist Max, does listen and support him, but starts an affair with Sasha’s mum, betraying their friendship; and Zhenya’s father never contradicts his wife, instead covering up his daughter’s plans to study in Moscow. The men offer little proactive help to the young generation: they are themselves immature, at best ready to conspire, and none of the male characters has a responsible job. Rather, Zhenya’s “diagnosis” would appear to be an overprotective mother: the mother’s overbearing comportment—instilling fear, preventing her from speaking, nursing her (even though she may not need any nursing)— reveals her wish to regulate Zhenya’s life and control her present and future. This behavior, however, is not something Sasha analyses, and here once again the film’s focus on his perspective limits also our understanding of her character.
Sasha’s search for his self is very much driven by the outside world: by his uncle Roman, by Max, by his mother, by his peers at school. They want him to enroll at university, or to start training for a job, or to join the army. As some of these career paths do not come easy, they try to rig his education for him. Soon, Zhenya will do the same, entering his portfolio for a competition to gain a place at the Mukhina Arts and Design Institute in St Petersburg.[1] Sasha is so disinterested in study (not to mention leaving Kaliningrad) that he does not even know the school. When Zhenya has left to study, he will nevertheless make Moscow his first destination to seek out Zhenya, rather than pursue his own path. At the story’s end, he does not gain anything but a realization: that he will have to make decisions himself. His mother has left with his best friend Max; he has broken up with his best (girl)friend Liza after having had sex with her and then telling her of Zhenya; and his “girlfriend” Zhenya has left for Moscow. There is nothing left for him in Kaliningrad, and his departure is more an escape from a void than a path to a destination and a new (adult) life.
Before his departure, he accomplishes the commission he had taken on for a graffiti on the hospital wall: he paints a dragon, and a prince and princess. This is a visualization of fears and dreams, and an articulation of his understanding that the world is not a fairy tale. It is an image that will certainly appeal to children, but it is about himself: his mother Sonya says at one point that she does not want to be a “dragon” who stops him from contact with his father. Sasha tells he she is no dragon, but when he does contact his father from her laptop, she is furious. In the graffiti, Sasha casts himself and Zhenya as prince and princess. Although he tries to find his princess Zhenya in Moscow, he is not the knight in armor, and this fairy tale will not come true.
Trofimova’s debut is visually well conceived: the rooms of Sasha and Zhenya reflect well their interests of drawing and designing, full of objects and gadgets. She has made excellent casting choices and explores with great sensitivity the relationship between Sasha and his mother Sonya, who is more a friend than a mother, and therefore her attempts at being “mum” are made to come across as out of character, which is well represented in Evgeniia Gromova’s performance. Kaliningrad as location is ideal for a “summer romance” that is never consummated and remains cool and distanced, as an interlude before real life will start in the autumn for those young people who have just left school. The character of Sonya in this location also echoes some of the sexual permissiveness of another role played in this setting by Evgenia Gromova as Lena in Nigina Saifullaeva’s Fidelity (Vernost’, 2019).
Notes
1] Since 2006, St Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design. Indeed, the email Sasha reads confirming his place is from the Stieglitz Academy. However, most people still refer to it as “Mukha,” named after the Soviet sculptor Vera Mukhina (1889–1953)
Birgit Beumers
Bristol
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Land of Sasha, Russia, 2022
Color, 83 minutes
Director: Yulia [Iuliia] Trofimova
Screenplay: Maria Shul’gina, Elizaveta Tikhonova, Yulia Trofimova, based on the novel of the same title by Gala Uzryutova
DoP: Egor Povolotskii
Editing: Marcel Shamshulin
Music: Sergei Stern
Sound: Vladislav Vdovin, Viktor Timshin
Production Design: Aleksandra Antonova
Costumes: Svetlana Shadrina
Cast: Mark Eidel’shtein, Mariia Matsel’, Evgeniia Gromova, Dmitrii Endaltsev, Alisa Tarasenko, Dar’ia Rumiantseva
Producers: Katerina Mikhailova, Konstantin Fam
Production: Vega Film
Premiere: Generation 14plus Berlinale, 15 February 2022
Yulia Trofimova: The Land of Sasha (Strana Sasha, 2022) reviewed by Birgit Beumers © 2024 |