Issue 84 (2024) |
Liubov’ Arkus: Balabanov. Belltower. Requiem (Balabanov. Kolokol’nia. Rekviem, 2022) reviewed by Frederick H. White © 2024 |
As the title suggests, Liubov’ Arkus’ documentary offers a new perspective on Aleksei Balabanov almost a decade after his untimely death. The requiem in this case is meant as “an act or token of remembrance” for her friend [1] and for one of the most important Russian filmmakers of the post-Soviet period. How should we now remember the Balabanov who captured so vividly the collapse of the Soviet Union and the violent rebirth of Russia? Arkus’ film mainly concentrates on the final two years of the director’s life, during which he made his last film Me Too (Ia tozhe khochu, 2012). Balabanov. Belltower. Requiem is a deeply personal film that depicts the pain of losing a friend. And yet, this may be the greatest weakness of the documentary. For Arkus, the irascible and sickly Balabanov on-screen cannot be the thoughtful friend whom she had known and loved in better times. More problematic is Arkus’ attempt to position the filmmaker as apolitical, objective, and neutral, so as to reclaim his posthumous legacy from those who have made him a Russian patriot.
Arkus, a leading Russian film critic and founder (and former editor-in-chief) of Séance magazine and its publishing house, begins her documentary with a summary of Balabanov’s cinematic works, highlighting many of the motifs and themes that we now associate with his films. Her intention is to reframe Balabanov and his posthumous legacy. Once discussed as a pessimistic auteur whose films captured the cultural zeitgeist, in recent years, Balabanov has been coopted as a Russian nationalist with Danila Bagrov, his bandit hero from Brother (Brat, 1997) and Brother-2 (Brat-2, 2000), repurposed for the “special military operation” in Ukraine (Nieman 2023). Arkus’ counter-narrative argues that rather than advocating for truth in force, Balabanov’s genius as a filmmaker was in telling truth to power.
Significantly, Balabanov depicted the void left within people following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Innocent people, including the child-like Danila Bagrov, endured a new Russia that was harsh, causing much pain and suffering. Most vividly, this was portrayed in Cargo 200 (Gruz 200, 2007), with the young Angelika cuffed to a bed, repeatedly raped, and made to sleep alongside her dead fiancé. There was no bandit-hero in this film, just a deranged patrolman. Where might one find happiness in all of this cruelty and chaos of post-Soviet Russia? Could Me Too be the response to Cargo 200 and his other bleak depictions of Russia? An epilogue? Repeatedly, Arkus returns to the final scenes in this film, in which the filmmaker playing himself does not find happiness.
In Me Too, the belltower is the locus for pilgrims looking for salvation for those who come to a nuclear wasteland hoping to find happiness. Some are taken by the belltower and ascend to a place of happiness. Those who are not are left to die from the radioactivity that has created a permanent winter wasteland in the region. Here, Balabanov playing himself on-screen, has not been taken by the belltower and will eventually die unceremoniously. Balabanov, like the bandits whom he glorified in his films, will not find happiness. Therefore, the decaying Zapogostskaia Church plays a significant role in both films—Balabanov’s and Arkus’. In these final years, Balabanov knew that his health was compromised and that he did not have long to live, so his demise on-screen and the belltower’s collapse forty days after his death off-screen changed the impulse of Balabanov. Belltower. Requiem from that of a production film to that of a remembrance. For the Russian Orthodox believer, the soul ascends to heaven forty days after the physical death of the individual. Arkus subscribes significant meaning to the collapse of the belltower that denied Balabanov his happiness.
Why would such a successful filmmaker not be happy? Arkus explains that the death of Sergei Bodrov Jr., the actor who played Danila Bagrov, along with 27 members of Balabanov’s own film crew, was a trauma from which he never recovered. Bodrov Jr. had been making his own film The Messenger (Sviaznoi, 2002) with many who had worked with Balabanov on successive films when they were caught in an ice and mudslide in the Caucasus. There were no survivors. This emotional shock and Balabanov’s own reaction to it compromised his health. His wife, Nadezhda Vasil’eva, listens to a doctor as he pointedly notes that if Balabanov does not change his mode of living, he will die within a year to a year-and-a-half. This finality was one impetus for the director to make Me Too. Arkus then vividly captures a sickly and bloated Balabanov in extreme close-up at home among family and friends, at film screenings and on the set of Me Too. It is difficult to watch. Only for a moment in the documentary, following treatment at a sanitarium, and while scouting for his next film project, Balabanov seems lucid and, dare one say, happy.
For Balabanov, happiness was defined as acceptance among a circle of close friends. This friendship led to a sense of contentment or happiness.[2] Clearly, this contentment was destroyed for Balabanov by the death of Bodrov Jr. and his close friends in the film crew. Therefore, Me Too is actually about the lack of acceptance and, as a result, the lack of happiness. Within the film itself, Balabanov bears some guilt as a filmmaker, hence his rejection by the belltower. Balabanov believed that he bore personal guilt not only for the death of his friends in the mudslide, since he recommended the location, but also for the vivid depiction of violence in his films that he helped to popularize. He dies on-screen next to the bandit who he made so revered in Russia.
Instead of interrogating this compelling inner-conflict within her subject, Arkus tries to deny those who have turned Balabanov into a proponent of Vladimir Putin’s Russian nationalism by claiming that he was apolitical. To do this she avoids, among many other instances, discussing the final scenes of Dead Man’s Bluff (Zhmurki, 2005) and Cargo 200. Certainly, these films were not apolitical statements. In each of these, he warned of the transition of common criminals into members of the political elite and saw the rise of Vladimir Putin and the security establishment as akin to the Grand Inquisitor and the (re)emergence of the totalitarian state (White 2015). As a result, there are elements of Balabanov’s film oeuvre that, if viewed selectively, appeal to pro-Putin nationalists, but also elements that speak to the anti-Putin faction. Arkus is disingenuous when she claims that Balabanov was objective and neutral.[3] In fact, it was this trait of conflicting rhetorical positions that is most compelling about the filmmaker’s oeuvre.
And then, not in chronological order, there are scenes from Balabanov’s funeral, concert tributes by musician-friends and the empty apartment where his wife and children continue to live their lives without him. Film producer and long-time friend Sergei Sel'ianov is the only other narrator of Balabanov’s life for this documentary. Nearly ten years after Balabanov’s death, the raw emotion still is just below the surface as Sel'ianov speaks about his friend. Sel'ianov is far more compelling for the audience than the sick and misanthropic subject of Arkus’ documentary.
In an interview following her film’s release, Arkus admitted that she wanted to show her friend as she had seen him. Her documentary was a response to the way in which Balabanov’s posthumous legacy was being refashioned in contemporary Russia. In fact, the original working title had been Balabanov’s Defense (Zashchita Balabanova). Arkus described Balabanov as a “very kind, very gentle person” who guarded his personal life and was only really known to people close to him (Ziza 2023). This kind and gentle version of her friend is one weakness of the film, that Arkus is unable to reveal him to the audience. Rather, it is the unwell and cantankerous version that dominates most of the documentary. In fact, Arkus casts her friend as a tragic figure “who absolutely could not come to terms with the structure of the world and with God, in whom he believed very strongly” (Ziza 2023). As a result, one has more sympathy for Nadezhda Vasil’ieva, who not only caters to her ailing husband’s needs, but then is left shattered and alone after his death.
One might not fault Arkus for this flaw as some, such as actor Ian Kelly, have suggested a similar fraught relationship with Balabanov, who could be genuinely kind one minute and quite cruel the next (Uait 2020, 191-208). Even Arkus admitted to this duality in a 2015 interview. Her first impression of Balabanov was that he was “rude” and that “he had a lot of anger for people and for the world,” but following successive tragedies (including the death of Bodrov Jr.) Balabanov became “a very gentle husband, son and father.” During this 2015 interview with Aleksandr Gronskii, Arkus claimed that Balabanov was uncomfortable with people and, therefore, he wore a mask that hid this gentle side (Uait 2020, 401-02). Unfortunately, in Arkus’ defense of Balabanov, this gentle man is rarely revealed for the audience.
Therefore, the value of this documentary is found in Arkus’ interpretation of Balabanov’s films; the first 16 minutes of Balabanov. Belltower. Requiem. Rather than revealing the hidden Balabanov, however, Arkus offers a nuanced interpretation of the filmmaker’s main themes and invites audiences to rewatch Balabanov’s films as a whole, not in their singularity, to truly understand his cinematic world. And yet, Arkus’ claim that Balabanov was an objective auteur of the Russian zeitgeist is, in fact, limiting and will certainly spark further debate, rather than remain the definitive word on one of Russia’s finest filmmakers.
Frederick H. White
Utah Valley University
Notes
1] This is characteristic of Arkus’ professional career to celebrate the careers of those friends she sees as true Russian auteurs.
2] Thanks to Anna Nieman for making this point clear in a personal conversation about the film Me Too.
3] Again, I owe a debt of gratitude to Anna Nieman for her insights on Balabanov’s appeal within Russia to multiple (and often opposite) political factions.
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Works Cited
Nieman, Anna. 2023. “Balabanov in 2022: Considering the Legacy.” KinoKultura 79
Uait, Frederik Kh. 2020. B-2: Brikolazh rezhissera Balabanova. Izdanie vtoroe, dopolnennoe i pererabotannoe. Nizhnii Novgorod: Dekom.
White, Frederick H. 2015. “Cargo 200: a bricolage of cultural citations,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 9 (2): 94–109.
Ziza, Tat’iana. 2023. “Liubov’ Arkus o svoem fil’me ‘Balabanov. Kolokol’nia. Rekviem’: ‘Ia dumala: a vdrug raz! – i snimu kino pro to, kak Alesha umiral i ne umer!’” Sobaka.ru 30 July.
Balabanov. Kolokol’nia. Rekviem, Russia, 2022
Color, 115 minutes
Director and scriptwriter: Liubov’ Arkus
Cinematography: Aglaia Chechot, Alisher Khamidkhodzhaev and Georgii Ermolenko
Editing: Dmitrii Novoseltsev
Sound: Sergei Ivanov
Production: Konstantin Ernst and Sergei Sel’ianov
Liubov’ Arkus: Balabanov. Belltower. Requiem (Balabanov. Kolokol’nia. Rekviem, 2022) reviewed by Frederick H. White © 2024 |