2nd Russian Film Festival (From Empire's archives)
By David Parkinson
Returning for a second year, Academia Rossica's Russian Film Festival boasts a programme of 10 London premieres that even surpasses the excellence of the inaugural slate. With several actors and directors guesting to discuss their work, this is an outstanding opportunity to assess the current state of one of the world's great film industries.
Easily the highest profile picture on show is Nikita Mikhalkov's 12, a reworking of the courtroom classic 12 Angry Men that sparked considerable controversy in Russia for its unashamedly pro-Putin stance. Yet, regardless of its political stridency, this can still be appreciated as a masterclass in both ensemble playing and in opening out a claustrophobic scenario without diminishing its intensity. Mikhalkov plays the ex-military foreman of a jury instructed to return a verdict on Chechen youth Apti Magamayev's alleged murder of the adoptive Russian father who rescued him from the conflict that decimated his homeland. But while cabby Sergei Garmash is adamant that his guilt is evident, self-made telecom tycoon Sergei Makovetsky has his doubts and he slowly begins to convince the sceptics in a series of heartfelt speeches and astute set-pieces that say as much about contemporary society as the accused's plight.
Each man has his moment of revelation, with those of Yuri Stoyanov's vacillating TV producer, Sergei Gazarov's knife-twirling Caucasian surgeon and Valentin Gaft's sagacious Jewish pensioner being topped by Garmash's account of his son's suicide bid. But while the scripting and performances are impressive, it's the way Mikhalkov keeps Vladislav Opeliants's camera prowling around the school gymnasium setting that gives the film a visual energy to match the potency of its discussion of racial prejudice and moral responsibility.
Intolerance also rears its head in Alexander Melnik's Terra Nova, a futuristic gulag saga that has its own distasteful instance of anti-Chechen ferocity. However, the massacre allows Pavel Sborschikov and his thuggish cohorts to establish their hegemony over the Arctic gaol that has been set up as part of a penal experiment in fascistic 2013. Having agreed to deportation as an alternative to life imprisonment, Konstantin Lavronenko quits the camp with a bagful of supplies and heads for the icy hills. However, lemmings eat his provisions and he's forced to hunt for food with psychopath Andrei Feskov, who proves an unlikely ally when they discover an abandoned plane and return to the colony to steal spares.
Between its pitiless slaughter sequences, this is a thoughtful Lord of the Flies-style treatise on how isolation and incarceration can either exacerbate man's baser instincts or inspire him to redemption and unsuspected nobility. Ilya Domin's images of the hostile terrain reinforce the contrasting characteristics of the inmates, but it's screenwriter Arif Aliev's exploration of themes already touched upon in Prisoner of the Mountains (1996) and Mongol (2006) that make this as fascinating as it's disconcerting.
Survival against the odds is also the key concept in Live to Remember, Alexander Proshkin's adaptation of Valentin Rasputin's wartime story about a country wife who shelters her soldier husband after he goes AWOL from the Red Army. But while she is able without arousing suspicion to keep him armed, warmed and fed throughout the Siberian winter, she can't prevent her in-laws from discovering her pregnancy and has to face accusations of adultery and treachery from her neighbours. Daria Moroz excels as the wrongly condemned woman, who has to endure the proud welcomes accorded to the returning heroes while knowing that Mikhail Evlanov can never come home again. But the fascination lies in the way that Proshkin subverts the tenets of the Socialist Realist war dramas that were produced in the Soviet era in order to show that not all of the sacrifices made during the Great Patriotic War contributed to the Communist cause.
Mikhail Kalatozishvili's Wild Field could easily have been made under the auspices of the USSR. Indeed, it bears comparison to Mikhail Bulgakov's A Country Doctor's Notebook (1925-27), as Oleg Dolin is dispatched to a remote clinic on the Kazakh steppe, some 200km from Alma-Ata. He longs for his fiancée to join him. But even though he is daunted by the sprawling, barren landscape, there's rarely a quiet moment for the young medic, as not only is he convinced that someone is watching him from a nearby hilltop, but the eccentric locals also involve him in all manner of misadventures. Having delivered a peasant from the aftereffects of a drinking binge and cured a cow that has eaten a tablecloth, Dolin becomes caught up in a gun battle between cop Roman Madianov's ramshackle posse and some lawless desperadoes. Then he recovers from the humiliation of being jilted by Daniela Sroyanovich to perform a life-saving operation with the most primitive equipment on the flirtatious Irina Butanaeva, who has been shot by her headstrong beau.
The grandson of the great Mikhail Kalatozov, Kalatozishvili uses Petr Dukhovskoy's glorious vistas to emphasise the influence of the Hollywood Western. But he also leavens the action with some broad comedy and plenty of melodrama, and he even shows that the city slicker can even learn a few things from his uneducated charges when they teach him how to revive a shepherd stunned by lightning by burying him up to his neck overnight. The denouement is somewhat predictable, but this is an intriguing allegory on the benefits and dangers of Russia ministering to ethnic enclaves in far-flung outposts.
Opera singer Ksenya Rappoport also acclimatises to unfamiliar surroundings in Kirill Serebrennikov's Yuri's Day, as she returns to her despised hometown before relocating to Vienna to teach sulky son Roman Shmakov about her backwater roots. However, he disappears during a visit to the forbidding citadel and Rappoport is forced to accept the charity of elderly Evgenia Kuznetsova after the police inform her that a person has to be missing for three days before they can investigate. Eventually Sergei Sosnovskii takes the case, but he is more intrigued by the dark deeds of Rappoport's youth and her acquiescent transformation, as glamour gives way to a drabness that confirms the town's re-exertion of its grip upon her soul.
Scripted by Alexander Sokurov's onetime collaborator Yuri Arabov, this darkly comic variation on L'Avventura slips easily between mystery and melodrama, satire and surrealism. Making eerie use of mists, snowscapes and the burg's contrasting architecture, Oleg Lukichev's expressionist photography suffuses the action with a melancholia that reflects the resigned meekness with which Rappoport accepts the futility of her bid to escape her true self. Her encounters with the feral inhabitants of a TB ward feel a touch extraneous, but Rappoport is superb as she surrenders her diva egotism and resumes her place in the choir where her career began.
Nurse Olga Sutulova is more pro-active in attuning to her new life in Igor Voloshin's Nirvana. Bored with Moscow, she heads north to St Petersburg. However, she has to settle for a room in a shabbily grand tenement, where she makes the oddball acquaintance of junkie Artur Smolyaninov and his bar-tending girlfriend, Marya Shalaeva. Tumbling into an affair with `Dead Man', Sutulova proves she can look after herself when Shalaeva hires a heavy to ward her off her lover. But they are forced to forge an alliance when Smolyaninov is kidnapped by drug baron Mikhail Evlanov and they have to raise a $10,000 ransom.
Posturing with plenty of attitude, Sutulova and Shalaeva gel well as the rivals who bond in extremis. But the dialogue is perfunctory and Voloshin doesn't have anything particularly profound to say about organised crime, substance abuse or the untapped power of Russian women. That said, the visuals matter much more than the content of this cyberpunk dysfantasia, with Pavel Parkhomenko's garish production design, Nadezhda Vasiliyeva's outré costumes and Anna Essmont's glam-kitsch make-up being bathed in a retro-futuristic sheen by Dmitri Yashonkov's lapidary cinematography.
The perils of life in the big city also become apparent to advertising executive Ilya Lubimov in Alexander Gornovsky's 20 Cigarettes, as he hurtles around Moscow trying to find Yoghurt Queen Galina Tuyunina so he can deliver the apology that might just save his job. However, he also has to get to the hospital where his wife has gone into labour and stay out of the clutches of Tuyunina's slutty daughter Anna Slynko, who has set her heart on a fling. With overbearing boss Maksim Sukhanov on his tail and indolent buddy Oscar Kuchera proving as much a hindrance as a help, Lubimov smokes his way through what he's promised himself will be his last packet of fags. However, it's touch and go whether he will be promoted before he's fired or will become a father before he succumbs to adulterous temptation.
Clearly deciding that subtlety isn't the best way to satirise Muscovite capitalism, Gornovsky keeps the action at a perpetual fever pitch that neatly reinforces the superficiality of Lubimov's profession and the perfidy of his private life. The design and cinematography have a shallow gloss that emphasises the gaudy modernity of a city in transition, while the visuals are peppered with numerical gags that owe as much to Peter Greenaway as the mood owes to such arch imagists as Michel Gondry. Lubimov makes a suitably flawed anti-hero, but it's Tuyunina and Slynko who steal the picture with their feline cameos.
Completing the programme are Simple Things, Alexei Popogrebsky's solo follow-up to Koktebel; Svetlana Proskurina's ironically titled memory play Best of Times; and documentarist Marina Liubakova's fictional debut, Cruelty, as well as four actualities, Sergei Bodrov's Drunken Sailor, Vitali Mansky's Virginity, Vladimir Kozlov's Rock Monologue and Ivan Bolotnikov's A Melody for German.
