Issue 85 (2024) |
Oksana Bychkova: Nina (2023) reviewed by Dmitrii Kuznetsov © 2024 |
Nina, Oksana Bychkova’s fifth feature film, feels like a love letter to Russian millennials—the hopeful, romantic, ambitious youth of the 2000s and the 2010s who are approaching the mid-2020s either firmly settled in their IKEA-catalogue, nesting middle-class lifestyles, or riddled with self-deprecation and hopelessness in the various corners of the world. The eponymous protagonist, Nina (Iuliia Peresil'd), is seemingly happily married to a well-off husband (Kirill Käro), lives with him in a sleek-looking house in the outskirts of Moscow, raises a son, and loves her job as a speech therapist. This bourgeois idyll starts to crack when Nina receives an unexpected phone call from her ex-boyfriend Ruslan (Evgenii Tsyganov), who invites Nina to come visit him in Tbilisi “to say goodbye,” simply stating that he is dying. Nina, who sounds standoffish on the phone, wishes Ruslan “all the best,” tells her husband that she wouldn’t go, but then, as if in spite of herself, she gets into a Yandex taxi to depart on a date with the past. As the viewer gets to know later, not only does Nina have a complicated history with Ruslan, but she is also not a stranger to the city of Tbilisi, where she seems to have spent a few formative years of her youth. Nina’s journey into the spatialized past is also a journey of self-discovery—her exploration of the city is indicative of learning herself anew, untethered from her familial routine as her Moscow life shrinks to the size of a phone screen. In fact, the film continuously emphasizes Nina’s emotional and spatial isolation—in the opening scene of the film we see her sitting alone, surrounded by the blinding whiteness of a snowy forest; in the opening credits, the title of the film appears only when she embarks on her solitary journey; throughout the film, she insists on walking back to her hotel unaccompanied by Ruslan; and in her last appearance in the film, she is completely alone, sleeping in a hotel room surrounded by gentle springtime sunlight and undisturbed by her incessantly ringing phone. At the same time, Nina immerses herself in Tbilisi, revisiting old friendships and exploring her emerging feelings for Leri (Andro Chichinadze), a charming local who helps Nina find her lost wallet. In Nina, Oksana Bychkova explores travelling and introspection as forms of escapism that allow the protagonist to connect to the world not out of obligation or necessity, but rather as an unmitigated expression of her subjectivity and personhood.
It remains ambiguous throughout the film why exactly Nina decides to go visit Ruslan—besides a couple of rare moments, their time together seems to be rather miserable for both of them, but especially for the protagonist. Nina’s husband, trying to mask his insecurity about Nina’s prolonged absence, tells her that he would never humiliate himself like Ruslan—begging for pity from an ex, to which Nina replies that it is not about pity, yet, she never clarifies why it was so important for her to go see Ruslan one last time. It appears that Nina’s feelings for Ruslan represent the relationship between the film and nostalgia, as well as between Oksana Bychkova and her oeuvre, or rather her debut film Piter FM (2006). In fact, there are multiple parallels one could draw between Bychkova’s first and last films, to such an extent that the characters of Nina begin to look like the characters of Piter FM but twenty years older, having matured alongside the viewers of both films. The most obvious parallel is, of course, represented by the character of Ruslan, played by Tsyganov, who starred as the young architect Maksim in Piter FM. It is compelling to see Ruslan as an echo of Maksim, whose unrealized creative ambitions, a failed marriage, and cancer diagnosis turned him into a bitter and emotionally abusive man. Maksim, who exacerbates his wilting away with cigarettes and liquor, states in one scene, “I am a ruin,” a derelict remnant of the past that did not survive the test of time. Even some minor character details nudge us towards reading Ruslan and Maksim as variations of the same character, separated by a twenty-year gap. Both characters go through painful breakups—Maksim’s girlfriend leaves him in the beginning of Piter FM, while Ruslan mentions that he had separated from his wife Masha, who shares the name with the dreamy radio host and Maksim’s love interest from Bychkova’s first film. Both characters are thematically linked with their departure from Russia—Maksim is making plans to move to Germany, while Ruslan is stranded in Tbilisi. In fact, having learned of his diagnosis, Nina even asks Ruslan why he decided to move to Georgia and not to Germany or Israel. The plots of these two films are similarly mediating the relationship between the characters through two different cities: a vibrant, summery Saint Petersburg, made of transitional space and time—subways, bridges, white nights—and a colorful springtime Tbilisi, with sobering crystal-clear air and narrow streets that seem to embrace the protagonist. Music and sound become integral to constructing the image of the two cities—the songs that Masha plays on the eponymous Piter-FM radio station, and the street musicians, the traditional dance rhythms, and the drinking songs that animate Tbilisi. Even the main emotional conflict of Nina seems to be a mirror reflection of the core tension in Piter FM—Maksim and Masha, having established emotional kinship over the phone, consistently fail at getting together throughout the film, while Nina and Ruslan are incapable of bridging the emotional distance between them despite spending several days together.
Bychkova’s self-referentiality, however, does not make the film feel derivative—if Piter FM looked hopefully towards the future, anticipating things that are yet to happen, and ending on a promise of Maksim and Masha’s fateful meeting, then Nina invites its viewers to take account of the past, to confront it alongside the protagonist. The film encourages such retrospection, addressing both Nina and the viewer with Ruslan’s melancholic remark, “If only we could have seen ourselves now from 2005, who we have become.” Developing on the theme of confronting the past, Nina faithfully follows T. S. Eliot, insisting that meaningful relationships end not with a bang but a whimper. The viewer might expect that having Nina and Ruslan see each other one last time on the precipice of death would encourage them to tie loose ends, ask hard-hitting questions, and unburden themselves from years of emotional baggage, but none of that actually transpires in the film. Instead, there is awkward catching-up, uneasy silences, understated expressions, petty bickering, evasiveness, and spiteful apathy. Nina is incapable of letting go of Ruslan, even though he is verbally and physically abusive, while Ruslan’s boorish and hateful behavior seems to be informed by his fear of death. He rejects the world before the world rejects him in the finite sense of the word, despising Nina’s seemingly perfect life and his own desire for her sympathy and intimacy. In order to make Nina give up on him, Ruslan has to destroy their past, which is why in their final altercation he berates her and confesses that he never loved her and cheated on her when they were together. This traumatic episode allows Nina to look beyond her own nostalgic projections and become fully untethered from the past. The film appears to be questioning the protagonist’s relationship with nostalgia, wondering what exactly compels us to hold on to the past even when it traumatizes us, but Nina does not produce a coherent answer to these questions. Is Nina’s relationship with Ruslan indicative of the current nostalgia for the mid-2000s, which is perceived as a time of “normalcy,” in the context of the current rise of the authoritarian tendencies of the Russian state and the international isolation experienced by Russian society? Is it a metaphor for the cultural divide, or rather, the media-stoked antagonism between those who have left Russia since the beginning of the war in Ukraine and those who have stayed? Did Bychkova aim to portray the dissatisfaction of Russian millennials with the present, as they feel that they were promised a different future? The film, while critiquing nostalgia, relies on it in order to connect with viewers around shared images of a romanticized past, while yet portraying them as treacherous delusions.
The image of the city in the film is aimed to support the theme of nostalgia, the tension between the old and the new. On the one hand, Tbilisi appears to be a city of tradition, of cultural codes of sharing food, singing, and dancing that are passed down through generations. Mikhail Khursevich’s camera makes great use of the narrow, medieval streets of the city, lingering on the patina of time—the cracked wood and the chipped stone—portraying Tbilisi as a labyrinth where the protagonist is temporally stuck, tracing her own steps over the same cobblestones, but also as a place of refuge, where Nina can hide until she is ready to face the world on her own terms. At the same time, Tbilisi is a city that promises new beginnings—her bourgeoning relationship with Leri, the marketplace vendor, develops through a series of accidents, all facilitated by the city space: Nina loses her wallet in the hustle and bustle of the market, Leri’s dog runs away in the city, which allows them to meet again when Nina happens to find it, etc. The image of the city becomes a reflection of Nina’s internal transformation, sometimes literally, like in the scene when she is walking down the street looking at herself reflected in the mirrors of an antique store. What her transformation is, however, is never explicitly articulated. Is it that she allows herself to imagine a future in which she is unburdened from her past? While the film is trying to convince the viewer that Nina is, somehow, changing—which is emphasized by Peresil'd’s face, lit in such a way that makes it seem almost ethereal, as if Nina is constantly emerging out of darkness—the nature of that change remains unclear. Even to herself, Nina struggles to articulate who she is or who she can be. In her last conversation with Leri, she ironically calls herself “an early old crone,” (“ranniaia babka”) framing her present as a precursor to a sad future.
As if to epitomize Nina’s failure to emerge as an autonomous character, the film ends with an utterly ridiculous plot-twist. After spending a night with Leri, Nina comes back to her hotel room, finishes packing for her early afternoon flight to Moscow, goes to sleep, and, suddenly, dies. Baffled viewers, upon reviewing the film, jokingly wonder if the film is trying to warn its audience about the life-threatening consequences of having sex with Georgian men. Other, less humorous questions could be raised on the subject of the film’s abrupt ending. Does Nina conceptualize death as the ultimate state of being untethered from the past? Is Nina’s death meant to represent some kind of cruel irony, a future promised and then foreclosed forever? Did Oksana Bychkova and her co-writer Liubov' Mul'menko get so utterly bored and disappointed with their protagonist that they decided she didn’t deserve anything better than an unexpected death that rendered irrelevant her newly found desire to live? Is it a grim diagnosis of Russian millennials, who are portrayed as superfluous and out-of-place to such an extent that they may as well fade into oblivion? In light of Oksana Bychkova’s allegations that she was prevented by the producers to work on editing the film and her failed intent to remove her own name from the film’s credits (Kosenko 2023), viewers can be reasonably skeptical about the final version of Nina, speculating what the director intended for the actual ending to be. The viewers’ speculation, somehow, becomes a fitting final note for the film—the “what if” that defines Nina’s relationship with Ruslan is reflected in the troubled production history, which works as a tribute to a generation that is plagued by the memories of hypothetical futures.
Dmitrii Kuznetsov
University of Southern California
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Works Cited
Kosenko, Valeriia. 2023. “Trudnosti perevoda: ‘Nina’ – zhenskaia drama o proshchanii,” KinoTV, 1 December.
Nina, Georgia/Russia, 2023
Color, 133 minutes
Director: Oksana Bychkova
Scriptwriter: Oksana Bychkova, Liubov' Mul'menko
Cinematography: Mikhail Khursevich
Production Design: Kote Djaparidze
Editing: Vadim Krasnitskii, Ivan Lebedev, Levan Kukhashvili
Cast: Iuliia Peresil'd, Evgenii Tsyganov, Kirill Käro, Andro Chichinadze
Producers: Ekaterina Filippova, Igor' Mishin, Vladimir Kacharava, Olga Azhnakina, Maria Pork
Production: Pan-Atlantic, 20 Steps Production, KION, MTS Media, with support of The Ministry of Culture
Release: 30 November 2023
Oksana Bychkova: Nina (2023) reviewed by Dmitrii Kuznetsov © 2024 |