FRANCOFONIA (2015)

Alexander Sokurov has become quite the cosmopolitan since his 2002 one-take epic Russian Ark made him an art-house star. Since then his subjects have included the American occupation of Japan and the German Faust legend, while his latest film is a sort of critical sequel to Ark, taking the Louvre museum in France. Francofonia strikes me as a sort of homage to Jean-Luc Godard in its mix of scripted scenes, essayistic narration and other meta elements, and while it's an homage to French cinema to that extent it also shows that you can take the boy out of Russia, but you can't always take Russia out of the boy. The nearest thing to a plot in the piece is the relationship between Jacques Jaujard, the French national museum director (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), and Franz von Wolff-Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath), the German official in charge of preserving occupied France's cultural heritage. Jaujard had already evacuated most of the Louvre's contents to auxiliary chataeux by the time Wolff-Metternich arrived, but as it turned out the German took his cultural preservation mandate more seriously than his Nazi masters probably intended, eventually earning the French Legion of Honor for his trouble. Their story, punctuated for some quasi-Godardian reason with a visible soundtrack, is interlarded with a Russian Ark-style tour of the Louvre, Sokurov's Skype (?) chats with someone transporting precious art by stormy sea on a freighter, and comments on the museum's history. The museum tour is reminiscent of Sokurov's earlier triumph not in its lack of editing but by the appearance of a historical figure, Napoleon Bonaparte (Vincent Nemeth). He haunts the Louvre, childishly pointing out paintings of himself and explaining that much of the museum's classical collection was plundered by him from the Middle East. The museum has another resident spirit, Marianne (Johanna Korthals Altes), France's counterpart to Uncle Sam. She frolics about in her liberty cap shouting the French Revolutionary buzzwords, "liberty, equality, fraternity," but in a telling moment the tour narrator urges her to get rid of the obnoxious Napoleon after he's grasped her hand, but neither she nor we can shake the Little Corporal.

You may have recalled by now that Bonaparte was a great enemy of Russia, perhaps second only to Hitler, but it's in Sokurov's discussion of what his people call the Great Patriotic War, particularly the treatment of the Louvre and Paris compared to the treatment of Leningrad and the Hermitage museum -- the setting of Russian Ark -- that particularly Russian hurt feelings come to the surface. You get the impression that Sokurov holds it against France that Paris didn't suffer the devastation that Leningrad endured. Never mind that France had surrendered before the Germans had to consider bombing Paris, while Leningrad became a symbol of continued Russian resistance to the Nazi war machine. What really bugs Sokurov, it seems, is the idea that Paris and the Louvre were spared because on some level Germans like Wolff-Metternich saw France as part of European civilization, but didn't extend Russia the same courtesy. I suspect that Sokurov suspects that that wasn't just because of Nazi anti-communism, though that clearly had something to do with it, and to do with why he closes the film with a loud, discordant version of the Soviet national anthem. Francofonia is subtitled An Elegy for Europe, but the overall tone isn't really elegiac. It use of Napoleon links France and Germany together in a culture of imperialistic aggression against the East, in the name of a Europe defined by its exclusion of Russia. You may not like or agree with that message but at least it shows that Sokurov hasn't sold out by returning to his museum motif. This newest film isn't as good as Russian Ark or Faust, but it still proves Sokurov one of the most consistently interesting filmmakers working today.

VIKTOR (2014): 'All because of that fat app!'

It's easy to say Gerard Depardieu is trying to horn in on Liam Neeson's action, but this thing right now with old guys who kick ass with a vengeance really dates back to Steven Soderbergh's The Limey (1999), a film that Depardieu's Franco-Russian vehicle resembles arguably more closely than any of Neeson's recent action films. In both The Limey and Viktor, an ex-con with a will and skills that are underrated due to his age goes to a strange country to find out who's responsible for the death of his child. In Soderbergh's film Terrence Stamp traveled from the UK to the USA. In Viktor Depardieu goes to Russia, where the actor conveniently happens to live now as an act of tax protest. The comparisons end there, however, because one you recall that The Limey is a good movie comparisons are no longer fair to Viktor.

Every generation, it seems, has its great actor who goes to pot in the belly for reasons perhaps unfathomable. Depardieu, once globally plausible as a leading man, has become the Marlon Brando of our time, but now hopes to be accepted as an unstoppable force of destruction, and as someone who can still attract the likes of Elizabeth Hurley to his bed. Hurley is this international production's token English speaker, though everyone in the picture speaks English, with varying degrees of incompetence. Honestly, some of the Russian performers make Depardieu himself sound Shakespearean, but all too often the great man himself mumbles mechanically through his lines. Still, nothing that comes from his mouth sounds as awful or hilarious as the rage of a Russian mobster who blames his current troubles on "that fat APP!"

Viktor, our protagonist, is an art thief whose boy got involved in drugs, got a girl pregnant, and died somewhere in Chechnya. Viktor goes to Russia with a lot of questions and some friends to help him get answers. The Russian police are aware of him and give him some warnings but given their inability to deter the country's reputed authoritarianism doesn't look like much to worry about. Viktor's method is to have his friends capture someone (sometimes with Viktor's own help) whom he can torture to learn the next step in his quest. Since Depardieu obviously can't do much real action, Viktor becomes a mild case of torture porn -- more so if we think of the audience as masochists. I hate to say it, but the best scene in the film, or at least Depardieu's most enthusiastic acting, comes when Viktor is enjoying a meal. He loves to cook, he tells a shackled victim, and he apparently loves to eat before he tortures someone. Food gets him in the mood to thrust cooking utensils into sensitive areas.

Philippe Martinez, who had previously directed Jean-Claude Van Damme in Wake of Death and Val Kilmer in something called The Steam Experiment, wrote and directed Viktor. He puts more energy into his direction of a Chechen folk dance performance over the end credits than he invests in the by-the-numbers plot. Everyone involved really seemed to think that any sixtysomething actor of repute can make a hit of this sort of story. And maybe there was a market for Viktor in quarters where Depardieu may be a reactionary hero for his tax resistance. But unless he exemplifies some patriarchal national manliness for you Viktor will look like little more than a fat man's vanity project, and a sad one at that given the star's storied career. But if no one weeps over the latest Taken movie because Neeson once made Schindler's List I suppose you can't hold Viktor against Depardieu's legacy.

On the Big Screen: LEVIATHAN (2014)

Nearly every review of Andrei Zvyagintsev's film comments on the picture of Vladimir Putin hanging in a crooked mayor's office as he negotiates the payment of blackmail to a Moscow lawyer who has dirt on him. But the film's real comment on Russia's prime minister comes during a drunken picnic as the guys plan some target practice. After the birthday boy spoiled the first round by taking out a row of vodka bottles with an AK-47, he brings out a series of portraits of past Soviet leaders for the next round. We see Lenin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, et al, while the collector mentions that he has a picture of Boris Yeltsin, whom he considers a small fry. As for the present generation (i.e. Putin), he says: let them ripen on the wall for a while. In other words, the jury is still out on the country's current controversial leader. Some outsiders expect every Russian cultural product to reflect on Putin in some way, since so many people abroad seem to obsess over him. In this case, Leviathan's corrupt, drunken, thuggish mayor should represent a thuggish corruption unique to Putin's Russia. If anything, however, Zyagintsev is part of a much older Russian cultural tradition that's as self-critical (if not "self hating") as any American trend. He may be a 21st century Dostoevsky, except that he seems to spurn, or at least keep a critical distance from spiritual solace. Meanwhile, Russians may not have the same tradition of anti-government thinking that we have in the U.S., and may not take one corrupt politician to represent politicians or rulers as a whole. Rather, there's a long "If the Tsar only knew" tradition that holds individual politicians rather than the central government responsible for local corruption. Zvyagintsev clearly sees something very wrong with Russia, but he most likely thinks it was wrong long before Putin came along.

Ironically, Zyagintsev, who won a screenplay award at Cannes but lost Best Foreign Film to Ida at the Oscars, claims to have been inspired by an American tragedy. If so, his Russification of the story includes a telling difference. In the American case, an aggrieved property owner attacked his municipal government with an armored bulldozer before the cops shot him down. That seems like a characteristically American climax somehow. In Leviathan, the aggrieved property owner, Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov), doesn't get to go so dramatically berserk. He takes out his frustrations on his straying second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova), only to end up apparently framed for her murder when her suicide looks more likely to us. The drunken thuggish mayor (Roman Madyadov) wants Kolya's land and has manipulated the law to drive him off with a payment far below the property's value. Kolya's old army buddy Dima is the Moscow lawyer who appears to save the day by blackmailing the mayor. But everything falls apart as Dima starts an affair with Lillia, only to be discovered by Kolya's borderline-delinquent son Roma (Sergei Prokhodaev) at the picnic. Dima's defeat is complete when the mayor and his goons beat him up, tease his execution-style murder and leave him tied up in a ditch miles away from town. Lilya has a chance to go to Moscow with Dima but chooses to return to Kolya despite his drunken threat to kill her. He wants to reconcile but Roma has always hated his stepmother and his eavesdropping on some rough reconciliation sex in the basement sends him over the edge, and eventually does likewise for Lilya. Kolya's only recourse is drunken despair. A priest compares him to Job -- hence Leviathan as in "Can you bait Leviathan with a fishhook," though the presence of whales and whale bones in this coastal town also justify the title. Job's problem, the priest says, was that he was preoccupied with the meaning of life, the point being that only God can figure that out and that Kolya should stop sulking and stewing over his grievances and misfortunes. Faith, then, is Kolya's only hope, except that he's off to jail for fifteen years while a brand-new church rises where Kolya's home once stood.

What solace can the church offer if its foundation is built on crime? Leviathan gives us starkly different visions of the church, contrasting the priest who attempts to console Kolya, and who collects day-old bread from the store for the poor, with a more worldly prelate who acts as the mayor's spiritual advisor and gets to consecrate the new church building. The poor priest challenges Kolya's despair, answering his "where was your god?" question with: My god is doing fine; how about yours? Yet Zvyagintsev makes even this presumably well-meaning divine somewhat repellent by visually equating his distribution of bread with the slopping of hogs. I don't know if that was his intent, but the juxtaposition definitely is intentional, though the point may be that people are hogs, not that religion is slop. Leviathan certainly portrays a squalid Russia, one that seems to run on vodka, and for which there are no easy alternatives. The most a Russian might say in his country's defense is that Zvyagintsev is more misanthrope than self-hater. If so, he's a curiously reticent misanthrope, at least by American standards. His preference is to distance us from violence if he can't avoid showing it. We don't see the fight at the picnic in which Kolya beats up Lilya and Dima, for instance, while we see Dima beaten up by the mayor's goons from behind the windshield of a car with its radio playing. Spiritual brutalization rather than violence seems to be his subject, and the overall tone of the film isn't distant in the American satiric style that often seems condescending. Leviathan is too empathetic and indignant for satire. Zvyagintsev sparks our anger over Kolya's treatment and encourages us to hold on to it by denying him or us a catharsis. If the church's answers are unsatisfactory, it's up to his Russian audience to think of something themselves. It's enough for us foreigners to understand that "get rid of Putin" isn't answer enough for the problems Leviathan diagnoses. While the film is inescapably about Russia on some level, I think global audiences will appreciate this worthy film more if they recognize the universality of the human conditions it portrays instead of striving to see it as a political statement.

THE HORDE (Orda, 2012)

The era of the "Tatar Yoke" in the Middle Ages was Russia's Holocaust. So you might think after watching Andrei Proshkin's historical epic, in which more than once we see scenes very similar to the selections at the gates of Auschwitz. Tatars -- superficially Islamized Mongols -- bring captive Russians to their city. The captives are asked if they have any skills. Those who do are taken away to slavery. Those too honest or too stupid to answer are summarily killed for their captors' amusement. Perhaps a better comparison would be with the era of Hebrew bondage in Egypt. The Horde tells of a sort of prophet who must work miracles to save his people from the caprices of a despot. Proshkin's film is an aspiring national epic of suffering redeemed by divine favor, or of a people's suffering redeemed by an individual's suffering.

Yury Arabov's screenplay is based on a quasi-historical event. After becoming ruler of the Golden Horde (or "tsar of tsars" in the English subtitles) by killing his older brother, Khan Janibek (Innokenty Dakayarov) desperately seeks the approval of his imperious mother Taidula (Roza Hairullina), who literally shares his throne. He grows more desperate when his mom suddenly goes blind. He calls on healers from all his domains, and beyond, to restore her sight, and he's quite unforgiving when they fail. We've already seen that Janibek is fascinated by the magic, or the idea of magic, but he's disgusted when the tricks behind illusions are revealed, kicking the crap out of one too obvous charlatan.

 

Where shamans, fakirs, etc. have failed, what about the Christian God? Catholic friars were in the throne room on the night Janibek took power (and apparently thwarted an invasion of France), but he looks closer to home, to Orthodox Muscovy, where it is said that the Metropolitan Alexei (Maxim Sukhanov) has the power to heal. The khan summons the priest to his capital with a simple deal: heal Taidula or Moscow will be razed to the ground. With one companion and a two-Tatar escort, Alexei -- who like many miraculous healers fears the sin of pride if not the very power within him -- reluctantly crosses the steppes to Janibek's court. Things start well when he crosses a gauntlet of fire without batting an eye, but he has no more success with Taidula (with whom he has a tantalizingly vague history) than the others. Something about Alexei's humility impresses Janibek just the same -- but not too much. He orders the metropolitan spared so he can return, on foot and in rags, to Moscow, in order to see it burn. He assigns a seemingly faithful retainer, Timehr (Fedot Lvov), to make sure no harm comes to the old man until the day of doom.

 

Alexei's failure has destroyed his self-esteem if not his faith. He can't bear to return to Moscow, instead joining a slave caravan back to the khan's city, where he survives the selection process only through official intervention. The metropolitan is put to work tending a fiery brick furnace while Janibek waits for him to break. To speed the process, he sets a quota of his co-workers to be chosen at random and killed each day. Alexei offers his life in someone else's place, and when his offer is rebuffed the full horror of the situation sinks in. He allows his clothes to catch fire, but his fellows beat the flames down and put him out in the rain in an impressive POV tracking shot. Left to die or live, Alexei raves in agony, still begging God to take his life instead of anyone else's.

What follows is anticlimactic only because The Horde has seemed to be a religious epic, yet ultimately denies us the presumed epiphany of a payoff. Alexei survives the night and wakes to find Janibek prostrating himself before him. Taidula has regained her sight and the khan has given Alexei the credit. The epiphanic payoff I was expecting was our view of the moment when Taidula is truly healed, but Proshkin and Arabov may have withheld it deliberately. Because the moment of recovery isn't shown to us in miraculous trappings, but is only reported to us (as it would have been in Greek tragedy) we can speculate that Taidula's trouble cleared up naturally, and that Alexei had nothing to do with it, whatever Janibek believes. In effect, the moment is a triumph of Janibek's faith in Alexei, but the tragic irony, from a Christian perspective, is that the healing saves Taidula and saves Moscow, but it doesn't save Janibek. He allows that Alexei has worked a wonder, or a miracle if you will, but that doesn't lead him to God/Jesus as a Christian would hope. Instead, in his last moments on screen he's still childishly fascinated by any purported wonder, enthusing over an Indian Rope Trick and playing with a new toy while his fate is being settled. You don't have to be religious to get the point and appreciate it as you would the premises of any fantasy film.

The Horde is an ambitious picture with impressive production values, and it justifies your time even if it seems to skid to an end fairly abruptly. The acting is solid, with Sukhanov and Dakayarov sharing top honors as a more complex variation on the Moses-Rameses act. A prize winner at the Moscow Film Festival, it's a fascinating window into Russia's self-image as an often-martyred yet divinely favored nation.

DVR Diary: CATHERINE THE GREAT (1934)

Every few years the studio system displays an embarrassing redundancy by giving the public two films on the same subject in the same year. Just this year, for instance, Hollywood gave us two Hercules movies. That might not be the best example, since fiftysomething years ago Hercules movies were practically a dime a dozen, but readers can think of other cases. Tombstone and Wyatt Earp didn't fall in the same calendar year, but they came so close together that I saw a trailer for the latter the night I saw the former -- at the time I thought the trailer gave the feature a tough act to follow, but the first Earp actually set a standard that doomed the second. Eighty years ago we had two Catherine the Great movies, but to be fair this was a transatlantic rather than inter-Hollywood competition. There were Hollywood talent and money in both pictures however. Paramount deemed Catherine a proper subject for the latest collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich. Their picture, The Scarlet Empress, is by far the better known of the Catherine movies. The British contender, sometimes known as The Rise of Catherine the Great, beat the Hollywood film into theaters by several months. Producer Alexander Korda, fresh from the global success of The Private Life of Henry VIII, had the backing of United Artists and the particular patronage of one of UA's founders, Douglas Fairbanks. The old swashbuckler would star for Korda in a career-killing bomb, The Private Life of Don Juan. For Catherine Fairbanks contributed his son, fresh from a stint in the Warner Bros. contingent in the Pre-Code Parade. Junior's Atlantic crossing began a middle period in his movie career. At Warners he'd proven himself a fairly charismatic young actor in a variety of roles, none of which marked him as his father's son. Later, he would become just that in the roles for which he's best remembered, in films like Gunga Din and Sinbad the Sailor. I haven't read Junior's autobiography, so I'm left wondering what sort of anxiety of influence he felt when Hollywood reporters described him and his father as a package deal for Korda. I do know this: his two best-known roles from his middle period are villains -- his Tsar Peter in Catherine and his Rupert of Hentzau in David O. Selznick's Prisoner of Zenda -- and the defining trait of his Peter is his hysterical resentment of a virtual parent.

Fairbanks's performance as Peter III -- from here on I'll stop calling him Junior -- pales for many viewers in comparison with Sam Jaffe's performance of the same role in Scarlet Empress. Jaffe gives a grotesque performance worthy of Sternberg's more expressionistic movie. Paul Czinner's film for Korda has suffered overall in comparison with Sternberg and Dietrich's iconic extravagance, but I rather like the modesty of scale in the Korda Catherine that makes Fairbanks's Peter a more menacing figure. The Tsar-to-be has lived for years under the thumb of his aunt, the Tsarina Elizabeth (Flora Robson), for whom men in general are to be dominated sexually and politically and Peter in particular is to be treated like a child. He angrily resists her attempts to marry him off, but is momentarily smitten by Catherine (Elizabeth Bergner), the princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, having caught her unawares and finding her charmingly guileless. Hoping to marry the heir to the throne, she has never seen him and doesn't know him when she meets him by accident. He likes that her behavior isn't conditioned by knowledge of his rank, but before his wedding day is done he starts second-guessing himself and her, jumping to the conclusion that she knew him all along and had tricked him into marrying her. In this comparably subtle way Peter's erratic intellect and paranoia are established while this Peter remains a sort of tragic figure. Who doesn't want to be liked or loved for who rather than what you are, after all? Unfortunately, Peter is such a damaged person, presumably thanks largely to Elizabeth, that who he is makes him a hopeless fit for what he must become. Even as he plans a purge after taking the throne, Peter leaves hints of a more promising sensibility, baffling his generals by asking for an opinion on military strategy of "Ivan Ivanovich," his idea of the average Russian and a man he can never find. His impulse dies as he interviews a literal-minded guard whose only answer to all questions is that his name isn't Ivan Ivanovich. The moment is comic if not tragicomic, depending on how generous you feel toward Peter.

How you feel toward Peter in this picture may depend on how you feel toward its Catherine. Bergner begins the picture as a simpering ninny but is slowly shaped into a future ruler by Elizabeth, who has no confidence in Peter's prospects. The actress never quite matures into the role history and the film demand of her; Bergner lacks Dietrich's iconic authority and the flattering framing a Sternberg could provide. Bergner never fully transforms into the voracious Catherine of legend, and her movie pointedly highlights the princess's first pathetic attempt to play that role. Advised by Elizabeth to make Peter jealous, she adopts a regiment and boasts of having seventeen lovers in the unit, but her count is as much bluster as the military uniform she adopts. In each case she comes across as a child playing an adult game. Her tragedy in this picture is that she really wants to save Peter from his madness as much as she wants to save Russia from his madness. What redeems her in our eyes is her reluctance to destroy Peter, however necessary doing so must be, and how outraged she is when he is inevitably destroyed. Bergner was highly regarded in her time and would come to Hollywood to do Shakespeare soon after this, but she isn't as impressive here as Fairbanks. She lacks his intensity but, to be fair, she isn't playing a madman. But the picture works in its modest way because Fairbanks plays a very human madman, while Peter's relationship with Catherine is emotionally realistic enough to make you wish a better outcome had been possible. Perhaps the best comparison of the two Catherines isn't with the sort of rival pictures I've mentioned, but with the two complementary pictures on similar subjects from 1964: Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe. One is indisputably greater than the other, but the lesser film doesn't wither in comparison but shows powerful qualities of its own. Likewise, if you concede the artistic superiority of The Scarlet Empress, that should still leave room to recognize the virtues of its nearly-forgotten double.

Alexander Sokurov's FAUST (2011)

The latest film from the director of the acclaimed one-take stunt film Russian Ark has something in common with that perennial candidate for Worst Film of All Time, Manos: The Hands of Fate: an pathetically diabolical actor with grotesquely stuffed trousers. Happily, the resemblance ends there, unless you feel let down by Alexander Sokurov's refusal to show us a war in heaven or the more spectacular episodes of the Faust legend. He's freely adapted Goethe's famous verse play -- with my poor high-school German I still recognized some of the poet's original lines in the film -- but treats the legend as an epilogue (or prequel) to a trilogy of films about 20th century tyrants: Moloch (Hitler), Taurus (Lenin) and The Sun (Hirohito). We are invited to see in Heinrich Faust a precursor of their destructive will to power, and to make him a more immediate ancestor Sokurov has updated the legend to Goethe's own time, the early 19th century. Making a German Faust film he couldn't help but tread on F. W. Murnau's territory but Sokurov's Faust is more reminiscent of Murnau's Nosferatu, while the setting and the mania that drives both Faust and his deranged assistant Wagner are reminiscent as much of Werner Herzog as of Murnau. The film may be as much a riff on German cinema as a riff on German culture and history.

Faust contemplates man (above) and civilization (below)

Sokurov sticks to the first part of Goethe's play, which is fine since Goethe himself didn't get around to part two until almost the end of his life. This leaves us in a mundane setting in which Faust (Johannes Zeiler) and Wagner (Georg Friderich) go about their archetypal quest for knowledge by dissecting cadavers. Wagner is creepy from the start and gets creepier later. The ever-frustrated Faust falls in with Mauricius the moneylender (Anton Adasinsky), Sokurov's Mephistopholes. In a great performance, Adasinsky sets the tone for the film. Mauricius is a petty if not pathetic devil -- the bulges in his clothes suggest that his angelic and demonic physical attributes have been stuffed inside his own grotesquely gnarled flesh. As a moneylender, he's often busy collecting on debts in this world, and in that role he's more hated than feared. He makes the traditional promises to Faust, and Sokurov mystifies the proceedings enough with distorted lenses to indicate that Mauricius can back up his claims. Faust isn't sure what he wants from this strange man until he encounters Gretchen (Isolda Dychauk) in a public bath where Mauricius makes a ridiculous spectacle of himself by stripping and flirting with the other girls. As Faust's desire for Gretchen grows, Wagner grows madly jealous, while Gretchen takes interest in Faust, despite his apparent involvement in her brother's death in a pub brawl, as a form of rebellion against a controlling mother.

 

Anton Adasinksy as Mauricius, clothed (above) and sort of unclothed (below)

The story follows the barest bones of Goethe's outline, though Sokurov doesn't follow Gretchen's storyline to its melodramatic climax. Indeed, the way he ends the film is a stunning statement of, if not his own than Faust's indifference to the moral stakes involved in his dealing with the devil. Like just about everyone else in the picture, the doctor has treated Mauricius with scorn during their walks through town and countryside. After the moneylender finally entices him to sign the infamous pact with blood, and Faust has his night with Gretchen, Mauricius seeks to recruit Faust into some infernal army, giving him armor to put on while donning some himself for a trek into a wild landscape that might be Hell. The armor soon grows uncomfortable and ridiculous for both travelers. More unexpectedly, Mauricius is increasingly uncomfortable with the environment itself, while Faust is increasingly fascinated.  For the devil this is, presumably, both his domain and his punishment, while for the man it's just a new world to conquer by gaining knowledge of it. A geyser terrifies Mauricius while Faust adores it until it bores him with its repetition. Impatient and uncomfortable, Mauricius demands Faust's soul, but the doctor tells the devil to wait until he's dead -- and if he won't wait Faust is happy to stone the helpless, wailing moneylender until he's buried under rocks, leaving our antihero free to explore this wonderful, terrible new world.

Repulsive as Mauricius is, you may find yourself feeling sympathy for the devil, for rarely has his work been shown to be more thankless, even when he seems to be winning. If Mauricius is a rebel angel of myth his punishment seems to be an inability to enjoy whatever power he gains over men. In town, he's plagued by a woman who claims to be his wife, while Faust, as a contemptuous ingrate, may be typical of what our mediocre Mephistopheles has to deal with in his real work. It's an interesting take on the devil, but where does that leave Faust in Sokurov's scheme of things? If he wants us to link Faust with his historical subjects from the next century, the thing in common must be a certain arrogant fearlessness or an indifference to consequences -- or a failure to take his own soul seriously.

Faust may leave you wondering what the ultimate point is, but it's a beautiful thing to ponder. Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography -- he's since worked with the Coen brothers brilliantly on Inside Llewyn Davis -- will put you in mind not just of Murnau and Herzog but of the paintings, contemporary with Goethe, of Caspar David Friedrich. Visually the picture is as much a masterful accomplishment for Sokurov as Russian Ark was, and the acting lives up to the images. Zeiler is great in the title role, but Georg Friedrich as Wagner nearly steals the film with a Kinskian tirade in which he demands to be called "the great Wagner," tries to convince Gretchen that he's really Faust, and shows her a homunculus -- a disembodied face, really -- he made all by himself to impress her. I must admit that I don't entirely get Sokurov's philosophical or spiritual points, but on a mere movie level Faust is a feast of elegant madness that can be enjoyed on that level -- depending on your taste, or your morals.

What a brat': BROTHER (1997)

Danila Bagrov is one of Russia's holy fools. The protagonist of Brother, directed by the late Aleksei Balabanov, is a remorseless killer who seems entirely free of malice. I might describe him as an amiable sociopath except for his obvious though not quite overpowering yearning to fit in to his country's pop culture. A veteran of the Chechnyan war -- he tells people he served his tour at headquarters but his skills make you wonder -- Danila's most prized possession as a civilian is his Discman -- his trust is not misplaced, we'll learn -- and his favorite band is the real-life rock act Nautilus. We first meet him blundering onto a music video shoot, and he spends the rest of the movie trying to track down the CD with the song from the video. Balabanov sets us up to see Danila as a dolt, and Sergei Bodrov Jr. looks the part, but there's more to the man than meets the eye, and maybe less in some respects.

 

Returning to his mother's home, Danila is urged to move to St. Petersburg, where his brother Viktor has taken their dead father's place as a provider for the family. Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov) turns out to be a small-time gangster who promptly takes advantage of his brother's military experience. For reasons of caution or cowardice, he gets Danila to do a hit originally assigned to him in a public marketplace. Danila does the job with unquestioning competence but gets wounded escaping the target's goons. His escape vehicle is a symbolically hollow freight tram driven by Sveta (Svetlana Pismichenko), whom he befriends in his almost automatic fashion.

Viktor farms another hit out to his brother, but this one goes wrong as our hero gets distracted by a party going on above the apartment where he and two gangster handlers are to ambush their target. The actual lead singer of Nautilus is among the partygoers and Danila, whose entry was a request for aspirin, sits rapt amongst the musicians and artists before remembering his task downstairs. Remembering that the goons had taken hostage an innocent man who'd stopped at the wrong floor and knocked at the wrong door looking for the party, Danila abruptly kills the goons rather than have them kill a witness. I'd call it a suicidal act if I thought Danila had any consciousness of the potential consequences. He may not, or he simply may not care.

Worse than suicidal, his betrayal of Viktor's boss endangers not just Viktor but anyone who knows Danila in Petersberg. The gang tracks down Sveta and brutalizes her to get information. They invade Viktor's apartment and force him to lure Danila into a deathtrap. But if Danila is a holy fool, he's not that kind of a fool. He gets himself a shotgun (one million rubles!), saws it off, customizes the shot, and goes in guns blazing. But while his brother has proven sort of a Fredo, Danila is no Michael. Viktor cries for mercy and gets it. In a comic close to this storyline, Danila sends his brother home to look after their mother while he seeks his fortune in the wider world.

If Danila seems sometimes to live in a bubble, that might be true of everyone else in Brother's Russia. His efforts to connect with people are often rebuffed. People seem reluctant to accept his gifts of money, perhaps thinking there are strings attached. His great romantic gesture of the picture is to rescue Sveta from her abusive husband, but her first reaction when he shoots the man in the leg is to rebuke Sveta and comfort her abuser. The problem may be with Danila himself, however; he gives people things and does things for them, but his self is a virtual void (that he tries to fill with music) with nothing to offer on a personal level. He may have been imagined as a post-communist blank slate, with pop music his substitute for tradition or cultural heritage. He may want to be part of that milieu but he clearly isn't one of them, and he may not be one of anything. Danila is an easygoing embodiment of the anomie that characterized the Yeltsin era for some observers. There's something blackly comic about his adventures but something unsettling as well. Bodrov, son of a director and eventually a director in his own right who died while shooting a movie, has a guileless if not affectless presence that seems just right for the character. He makes Danila a perfect enigma, allowing you to wonder whether there's more than meets the eye or if there's simply no there there. Bodrov and Balabanov reunited for a more broadly comic sequel that takes Danila to the U.S., and on the strength of Brother I owe that film a look someday.

ELENA (2011)

Andrey Zvyagintsev's film starts as a visually eloquent portrait of class divisions in post-Communist Russia. All the director needs to do is follow the title character on a long commute. Elena (Nadezhda Markina) is a middle-aged former nurse who married a former patient, a wealthy businessman. She still seems as much a nursemaid as a spouse to Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov). She sleeps in a separate bed and rises ahead of him to draw his curtains and prod him awake. We'll see evidence later that the couple remains intimate and occasionally affectionate. But something stands between them: Elena's adult son Sergey (Alexey Rozin) and his family. The best sequence of the film traces Elena's long commute from Vladimir's spacious, modern home to Sergey's cramped apartment. Elena doesn't drive; for her there's a lot of walking and riding trains, and a stop at a grocery store, before she makes her way past a nuclear power plant to Sergey's home in the projects. Zvyagintsev directs with an empathy rare in modern film for modes of travel other than driving, and a keen eye for the geography of class. Living in the shadow of a nuclear plant is today's equivalent of the proverbial other side of the tracks. In her commute, Elena seems to cross from one world to another.

Sergey is unemployed, an apparent deadbeat. Married, he has a teenage son and a baby. The boy isn't promising. He may be Russian but you know the type. Apart from the occasional gangfight, he stays in his room and plays video games. Sometimes his dad will join him. If the boy can't get into college his only future is the military, a prospect Elena dreads. A scholarship isn't going to happen, and Sergey certainly can't afford to pay the boy's way. Vladimir can, but he can't understand why he should have to support Elena's people -- he didn't marry them. But he doesn't want to hurt Elena's feelings, either, so he says he'll think it over some more after initially refusing her. Then he goes and has a heart attack while swimming at his health club.

Vladimir's health crisis brings his own estranged child, a daughter, out of the woodwork. He's desperate to reconcile with her and is willing to make that a monetary transaction if necessary. While giving Elena a final refusal on subsidizing her grandson's education, he proposes to write a will giving most of his wealth to the daughter. That provokes Elena to take extreme measures....

That's the story, and you might be forgiven if, after memories of the impressive cinematography of Mikhail Krichman and the dependably ominous music of Phillip Glass fade, you find yourself wondering: is that it? In a way, I could argue that Elena is more realistic for doing without the melodramatic complications that usually follow this film's defining act. Zvyagintsev and screenwriter Oleg Negin clearly aspire to some damning portrait of pervasive ruthlessness in 21st century Russia. The constant background noise from TV is obviously meant to underscore this point -- a sports commentator observes that a sports coach is using "typical Soviet tactics" to push his team to the limit, for instance. But the obvious artistic ambition on display seems to demand that more happen in the picture than actually does, and Elena appears more pretentious in retrospect than it really should seem. Bringing in Glass to score the picture furthers that impression; using the arch-minimalist of modern music isn't exactly cinematic minimalism. The real problem may be that we don't see enough of Elena's two families to understand the choice she makes. We can see that the story's a kind of tragedy, but the presentation is perhaps too deadpan, too concerned with widescreen composition, for us to feel the tragedy enough, Markina's fine performance notwithstanding, for the social criticism to strike home. Maybe something's simply missing in translation. On the other hand, maybe my dissatisfaction with the ending was what the filmmakers intended: a blunt representation of Russia's constant injustice. That possibility allows me to recommend Elena despite my reservations. The film has a lot going for it in any event. Whatever it wants to say about Russia, its issues are really pretty easily recognizable no matter where you watch it.

THE ALIEN GIRL (Chuzhaya, 2010)

Anton Bormatov's movie was panned upon its limited theatrical release in the U.S. Most reviewers saw little beyond perceived cliches and brutality, and Chuzhaya is pretty much an archetypal crime story. It's an uncomfortable mating of noir tropes and the modern gang picture as a femme fatale comes between a young thug and his Ukrainian homies. Visually, it's a jarring mix of artistic compositions and the aforementioned unglamorized brutality. I'm not sure what the reviewers wanted, since I was impressed by a picture that admittedly wasn't innovative but did strive to breathe life into crime-film archetypes in a relatively novel setting.

Crackhead Kiev crime boss Rasp -- short for Rasputin? -- sends four stooges to Prague to bring home Angela, "the alien" (Natalia Romanycheva) so she can be used as a hostage to keep her freshly-imprisoned brother from ratting on Rasp. Angela was exiled to a gypsy whorehouse, we learn later, to keep her away from investigators after her role, on Rasp's orders, in the poisoning of a group of drug-dealing Kazakh cops. If her brother doesn't talk he'll get the death penalty, and once he's dead Rasp'll probably kill Angela just to be safe. None of that matters to the four stooges -- "Kid," the leader; "Beef," the fat one; "Booger," who gets shot in a gunfight with the gypsies; and "Whiz" (Evgenii Tkachuk), the youngest and maybe the brightest of the group. The gypsies want them to pay for Angela, but Kid pays them in lead. Angela's future doesn't matter -- until she starts to work on them. Once they're down to three after leaving a bleeding Booger outside a clinic, Angela looks for someone to save her from Rasp. Whiz wins the sweepstakes; enticed by sex and a sob-story, he takes down Kid and Beef but is traumatized by doing so. Angela has to take matters into her own hands to finish them off.

Whiz is haunted by his homies, guilt-stricken by having violated the one code he knows: loyalty to his gang. He takes no comfort in his quasi-erotic idyll with Angela in an abandoned excursion boat and her talk of fleeing west to live like normal people. Finally, however, she convinces herself and Whiz that they won't be safe until they take the fight to Rasp on his own turf. The setup is almost too good to be true -- so what if it involves betraying a bodyguard already persuaded to betray his boss -- except for Whiz taking a bullet. He'll live, but he can't run, and Angela leaves him to the cops. He loses and she wins, but don't forget those loose ends....

Toward the end, the imprisoned Whiz meets Angela's brother, who explains where she got her "Alien" nickname. Turns out that she's named after the Ridley Scott movie (which Whiz, as of this 1990s-set story, has never seen), and there's a reason she's named "Alien" and not "Ripley." I can see people dismissing this picture as deeply misogynist, since it portrays Angela as a manipulative monster who destroys male camaraderie from within, but my own rule is that no one woman is all women. "Alien" is not Bormatov or his writers' portrait of an entire gender but Romanycheva does give a harrowing portrayal of survivalism taken to a sociopathic extreme that doesn't stop with Rasp's demise. Opposite her, Tkachuk is convincing as an ironically guileless (though not guiltless) thug torn between male bonds and sex drive. His best scene comes when Angela tries to explain why her brother won't rat Rasp out if Rasp has her in his power. Her explanation, of course, is that Rasp will kill her if her brother squeals, but before she can say this Whiz, still haunted and grieving over the friends he's killed or left for dead, bursts out with, "It's wrong to rat on people!" The tragedy of crime cinema, noir or not, is the struggle of lawless people to live by some code when any code is impractical, to say the least. Chuzhaya catches that ironic outrage among criminals that makes their betrayals often seem more poignant or tragic than the everyday betrayals of law-aiding life. A simplistic reading would conclude that the film blames everything on Angela, who planted the seed of betrayal in Whiz. But we ought to remember that no one is innocent in Whiz's world, and we can also question whether his thug cronies, brutes and boors all, were really more worthy of his loyalty than the alien girl.

Bormatov aspires to some pictorial grandeur in the scenes in and on the beached boat and the cinematography overall by Anastasi Mikhalov achieves effective contrasts between dark, drab and damp cityscapes and the more open emptiness of outdoor exile. But let's not overrate Chuzhaya into a neglected neo-noir classic. It's a predictable enough story of the sort we've all seen often, if not in this particular setting. The violence may grow monotonous and the tone may seem oppressively dark -- this is the sort of film in which most of the cast comes back for an encore on morgue slabs. But for fans of crime cinema interested in broadening their geographic scope I think there's something to see here.

LETTER NEVER SENT (Neotpravlennoye pismo, 1959)

Mikhail Kalatozov is probably the most renowned Russian film director from the time between the death of Sergei Eisenstein and the emergence of Andrei Tarkovsky. His reputation outside the former Soviet Union is based on a handful of films, arguably no more than two: his war film The Cranes are Flying and his tribute to Castro's island, I Am Cuba. The Criterion Collection recently released the film Kalatozov made between those two highlights, a paradoxical exercise in abstract patriotism that didn't capture the world's imagination quite the same way. The patriotic aspect of Letter Never Sent may have turned some audiences off if they took the film for Communist propaganda. On the other hand, the impressionist effects Kalatozov attempted may have baffled people expecting something different from the land of Socialist Realism. They certainly left me wondering how Kalatozov, who suffered censorship earlier in his career, got away with stuff that I presume would normally get criticized by cultural commissars for "formalism" or worse. Directors of far more conventional films got that treatment, but maybe under "Thaw" conditions Kalatozov, as the star Soviet director abroad, could get away with more, so long as it elevated the prestige of Soviet cinema.
The story concerns a small team of geologists -- two college students, a mentor and a guide -- prospecting for industrial diamonds in Siberia. Theirs is a patriotic mission; should they succeed, they'll reduce the USSR's dependence on imported diamonds. But prospectors have been hunting for diamonds for years with no luck, and our team does no better at first. Our point-of-view character is Konstantin, the author of the titular unsent letter addressed to his beloved Vera, whom we see in his reveries. For a while, I wondered whether Vera was actually dead and that was why the letter goes unsent, but whether she's alive or not soon becomes a secondary matter.

Suffice it to say that the two young geologists and lovers, Vera and Andrei, make the big discovery shortly after Vera fends off unwanted advances from the guide Sergei. They hardly have time to announce their find via radio before a forest fire separates them from most of their supplies. After their radio fails, they're stranded in the taiga with winter coming fast. The government tries to reach them, but there's a lot of territory to cover, and as they search in vain the party dwindles to a final survivor floating downriver on a makeshift frozen raft....

I haven't seen the other Kalatozov films but I know his reputation for daredevil camerawork, particularly in I Am Cuba. Letter Never Sent lives up to that reputation. Kalatozov was a director who worked in three dimensions without special technology apart from a mobile camera and an awareness of the space outside the camera frame. He likes to swing the camera left or right to catch important details or simply to follow action outside the original frame, broadening our perspective of the landscape while doing so. Sometimes he just lets the camera run and run in tracking shots or POV shots that anticipate the camerawork in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies. The persistent effect of this film is the reminder that the taiga is bigger and more dangerous than we first realize. But Kalatozov goes beyond that. He illustrates the fervent effort of the expedition by superimposing fire over montages of the team in motion or in action. At times the movement of the camera and the movements of the people and the elements make the frame an utterly abstract blur, as Nikolay Kryukov's Shostakovichite music churns away to underscore the symbolic industriousness of it all. It's definitely the opposite of Socialist Realism, and you don't have to be a Stalinist commissar to find it somewhat self-indulgent while admiring the visual ambition behind it.

Kalatozov settles down to more naturalistic filmmaking as the struggle for survival takes over the story, though he throws in one abstract attempt to illustrate the dimming of consciousness at the moment of death. In its second half Letter Never Sent transforms from nature adventure with a hint of romance and pathos to a grimly inspiring tale of heroic sacrifice. While our heroes have informed the government of their find, they still need to deliver a map of the diamond field's exact location. They can do without anything else, but someone has to get that map to civilization. The nearest the picture comes to Communist propaganda is its validation of sacrifice for the motherland. Its most mawkish moment comes when Konstantin reminds Vera of her Young Pioneer oath and observes that most people who memorize it never really have to live up to it, but now's the time. Whether you interpret the ending as happy or not, the message seems to be that it was all worth doing, whatever the cost. Whether you agree probably depends less on your opinion of the historical phenomenon of Marxist-Leninism than on whether such a mission, no matter for whose sake, is worth such sacrifice. The Soviets must have thought it was worth it, and that Kalatozov thought so, because the film was released rather than shelved. The impression it leaves today is of camerawork as an end unto itself and characters as expendable as actual people were once presumed to be under Communism. The artistic self-indulgence of Letter Never Sent somewhat subverts its evocation of nature's extremes, but as an exercise in sheer cinematic artistry it's an interesting addition to the Soviet cinema canon.