Issue 87 (2025) |
Svetlana Filippova: Lisbon (Lissabon, 2023) reviewed by Maksim Kazyuchits © 2025 |
Monochrome July
Lisbon is the full-length fiction debut by the well-known Russian animator Svetlana Filippova (Mitia’s Love [Mitina liubov’], 2018; Brutus [Brut], 2014). The film premiered at Vyborg (Window on Europe) in 2023, and has played at national and international festivals since, while it is being readied for Russian release.
It’s July: the time of exams in higher education institutions, and of work practice. What better moment to stop being a family is a rhetorical question. When does family stop? When she still wears a wedding ring, and the jointly adopted dog moves from one house to another? When he doesn’t forget to take the dog, but doesn’t come for an invited dinner with a water-melon, just to see the children? Thus begins Lisbon, with a panorama and the water-melon. After waiting for some four hours, the mother and two teenage children have eaten up the melon and the dog has joined in. The plot is here, but it is not for an audience, as all plots of human dramas shot in the niches of genre and the festival circuit.
In Russia, television and cinema, as well as state services of public opinion, nowadays declare unanimously that Russians unconditionally prefer traditional values to liberal ones. Therefore, recent years have been declared as Year of the Family, of Youth, of Teachers, Culture, and Literature. When those options were used up, entire decades were named: of Childhood, Science, and Technologies. So, it is best that families are complete and marriages lasting. Therefore, the lonely and incomplete families must be sad: this turn has convincingly occupied its positive niche in Russian cinema thanks to the doc-movement and the female wave that emerged from it, such as Valeriia Gai-Germanika, Natalia Meshchaninova, Anna Melikyan. Simply, strong, lively, without half tones, from the heart, maybe even with an open ending, with both alcohol and strong words, and harmless mutilation.
But how to show without half-tones not an idea, but a feeling that the family becomes older, you grow older, the children and the love for a person who was maybe not the best husband and father? The children begin their own life, and your own time is gradually slowing down. But it is not even about children and time, but thanks to Italian neo-realism could be called uncommunicativeness.
In this situation the main character of Lisbon finds herself. The daughter, the student Varya, gets ready for her training abroad and does not even want help gathering things. The son, Vanya, figuratively jumps on the footboard of a locomotive: his path to adult life is slightly more complicated. Therefore, the mother has invited the old family acquaintance Boris, so he might advise which of the son’s photos would be suitable for the entrance exams. Not without female vanity she notices that Boris watches her as he used to.
Vanya went to the entrance exam, but somehow it did not work out. Perhaps because a creative higher education institution in July is reminiscent of a madhouse. However, the young man preferred to wander in the rain, and reads on a book skip Platon’s selected dialogues (judging by the jacket, a 1965 volume from the library of antique literature)—not because of some delicate inclinations of his soul. A sleepless night forced him to rip through this complex text. And his father, dead-drunk sleeping on a bench in the yard. Vanya poured the remains of his energy drink over the father and then pushed him off the bench. He continued to sleep in the dirt, but henceforth stopped to exist for the son.
For Varya, the father had stopped to exist slightly earlier, in the toilet of his apartment, in the neighboring house in the same yard. He was a good father while patiently explaining to the daughter the skills of photography. But while the photo dried, a new woman came. Yet without the half tones, things did not work out. When Varya carelessly took a box with reagents from the shelf, she saw the father’s work: a nude, à la Kustodiev. But not even the arrival of the diva, but the father’s phrase: “Sit here, then leave slowly,” marked the end. The girl took away the old photos—a laughing mum from an old film—and never again answered the father’s calls.
Mikhail seemed like the person about whom Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote: “To make nails of these people, and there would be no stronger nails in the world.” He put the paint on the canvas of life (maybe not the best metaphor) in the same way as the Ministry of Culture issues distribution certificates. If something somehow didn’t work out on the canvas, he threw it out. Vanya does not answer the calls? So, the next best photo of the son flies onto the floor. But why so sad?
Today, Russian festival cinema has a hard time, not only because directors and critics are fed up sinking into gloom, answering global challenges of society, fighting against “the rotting West”, and buying cars from friendly China. Cinema in Russia has become not so much lazy, but careful; and not so much careful, but pragmatic. All the films where the heroes do not easily fit into some agenda are, in the best traditions of Brezhnev’s stagnation, accused of conflictlessness and lack of theme. It is even more sad that similar claims were made towards the characters in Lisbon (the heroine is a parasite, and it is not clear what the main characters lack) not only by the general viewer but also by professional film critics. To show today, without resorting to the cliches of festival cinema, that not the family has broken up, but the sense of oneself as a living, thinking creature in this life, is possible (at least in Russia now) only by means of a profound visual solution. And Lisbon chooses this path.
Actually, there have never been alternatives in the past, not even when Kira Muratova made The Long Farewell (Dolgie provody, 1971) nor when Alexander Sokurov made The Second Circle (Krug vtoroi, 1990), not to mention Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclipse (1963), or Michael Haneke’s Hidden (Caché, 2005). The ‘auteur’ in independent cinema has one simple task: to force the viewer, and the critic, at least for 90 minutes, to stop chewing the subject-matter and plot design, detecting in the protagonists basic cliches—like on a subway map, and following the plot with the persistence of a train controller while folding it into a clear and convenient narrative.
The visual solution of Lisbon is whimsically built not only by Svetlana Filippova (she is also the production designer); the director of photography of the project, Andrei Naidenov (The Pencil [Prostoi karandash, 2019; dir. Natal’ia Nazarova], Oxygen [Kislorod, 2009; dir. Ivan Vyrypaev], Euphoria [Eiforiia, 2006; dir. Ivan Vyrypaev]) found for the characters a smooth tempo-rhythm of slow cinema. In the monochrome month of July, the protagonists are hermetically corked up: in the frame, too often things are out of focus, except figure or face. The soft focus, seemingly an irritating trifle, turns habitual things into intolerable sights. They are present or not, the focus is not adjusted and to look behind the melodramatic plot is inconvenient. One must look slowly: the viewer, and the critic. With the eyes of the auteur, but more with the eyes of the heroine. Time, and life, seems to slip by her.
Such a labor-intensive approach with a visually difficult, monochrome image, and with complex composition and focus, turns the banal story about a woman who once somehow got lost silently into a drama in the spirit of Marcel Proust. This pursuit of slipping time is rendered in Maria Smolnikova’s remarkable acting (at the Moscow Art Theatre in the performance Serezha, based on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina). Her character, the mother of Varya and Vanya, constantly hurries, stumbles, fights against dumbbells, door frames and thresholds visible only to her. She obviously drags the children alone, and neither the soft focus nor the monochrome scheme can single her out of this circle of preparing for lectures, constant calls to the son who does not answer the phone, the unexpected but not always pleasant visits of her children’s father. She is not a musician, but maybe a musicologist: she is irritated by a melody without development, but not the totally out-of-tune antiquarian Ernst Kaps piano.
Paradoxically, in Lisbon sooner or later you learn the names of all characters, except one: the mother has no name. The ex-husband, the son, the daughter, her friend: they all address her, but nobody ever calls her by her name. Only once, quite illegibly, right at the beginning, when the ill-fated watermelon has been eaten, the phone rings. On the other end, a drunken Mikhail says “Anna,” and then in a long and incoherent speech tries to explain that they should not wait for him today. And still, nevertheless: spring, summer, winter and again—generally, life goes on. Boris has gone somewhere, probably for a photoshoot; he has not returned in October as promised. But he comes back a month later and calls.
The scenario of Lisbon was born from separate recordings of documentary sketches, comic and not really; of casual dialogues and monologues; and these got perfected during the actors’ reading. The film was conceived as a combination of fictional episodes with animation, before the events of 2022 overturned plans for all and everyone. By the Russian festival repertoire of the past two years, it is visible: the stagnation of selections among African and Arab cinema has, if not estranged both public and authors from European cinema, then certainly generated a certain fear before it. The fear quickly developed into a conviction, and conflictless cinema today for some critics in Russia seems… suspicious.
Svetlana Filippova completed her work, renouncing many things, for example Ivan’s dreams to be made in the technique of coal animation, a scene with Anna’s lecture about Hamlet, an episode with the family psychotherapist. But she kept the main thing. Her Lisbon is not attuned to women’s cinema that receives the state’s support, to socialist realism; it has no appeal to parental vigilance and civil liability.
But there is a frame which is more valuable than all this: Vanya with an old 35mm photo camera Zenith, standing on the street, taking a picture of the mother. This is less about him photographing, but how he looks at her in adoration. Anna (as always, small and uncollected, foolish, but probably having found her lost time) stands in the room behind the window on the window sill, leaning out of the top window, because it seems to her that from there the connection would be better; and she speaks on the phone.
So, it is not yet late, and we can still hope …
Translated by Birgit Beumers
Maksim Kazyuchits
Moscow
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Lisbon, Russia, 2023
Color, 96 min.
Director & Scriptwriter: Svetlana Filippova
DoP: Andrei Naidenov
Composer: Andrei Karasev
Production Design: Svetlana Filippova
Cast: Maria Smol’nikova (Anna), Oleg Iagodin (Mikhail), Stepan Kharchenko (Vanya), Evgeniia Burmaka (Varya)
Producers: Dmitrii Vorob’ev, Aleksei Fedorchenko
Production: 29 February
Svetlana Filippova: Lisbon (Lissabon, 2023) reviewed by Maksim Kazyuchits © 2025 |