The screenplay of "4" is credited to edgy contemporary Russian author Vladimir Sorokin, and in case you think movies aren't serous business any more, reportedly everybody who worked on making "4" was beaten by angry viewers. It may be that Khzhanovsky went a little haywire in the latter part of the 2-hour-plus film, losing some of Sorokin's structure because he became a little too taken up with a lively and colorful group of wizened crones who are the actual inhabitants of the remote village to which protagonist Marina goes for the funeral and wake for her (twiin?) sister. Did the crones actually get drunk on the vodka they are shown swilling in the wake scene and thereafter? Was the camera-work meant to grow increasingly sloppier? Warning to young filmmakers: don't let colorful locations run away with your picture. Nonetheless this is a humdinger. Dangerous to be so provocative with your first big feature film. It made him famous (or notorious), but it was six years till he finished another film (Dau, an epic biography of the scientist Lev Landau, which is now in post-production).
The film begins slowly but intriguingly with a half-hour sequence of three people telling lies to each other at an after hours bar, inventing fantastic occupations. Marina, who is a whore, pretends to be in advertising. A stylish, somewhat effete man who is really a meat dealer claims to purvey spring water to the president. The other man, deadpan chain smoker with a crewcut who later admits to Marina he's a piano tuner, tells a preposterous and revolting story about being a geneticist involved in cloning of humans that he claims has gone on since the Stalin era. "4" refers to the habit of cloning double twins. When he gets into a tale of homosexual rape among black clones in a slum the meat broker goes off in a huff. His discovery of "round" piglets sold at a fancy restaurant is assurance, if needed, that "4' is bizarre and surreal. Everybody has written about it. The Times called it "mysterious" and "mesmerizing," and Jonothan Rosenbaum wrote about it favorably (though I can't access his review -- some of the online archives don't go back as far as 2005 or 2006).
Although at the one-hour mark, with the film half over, things only are beginning to happen, and that's not very good, the opening sequence at the bar, even if over- long, is atmospheric and intriguing. One excellent and admiring review by Ty Burr of the Boston Globe described the scene as a surreal, futuristic Russian version of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" "come to life with a script by a post modernist prankster"(and Burr identifies Sorokin as "one of the more controversial voices in post-Soviet literature"). But it's scary and provocative rather than dreary. It's interesting to begin with three characters who are quite mysterious. Unfortunately the film delves into the meat broker's life only briefly, and the pretend geneticist piano tuner not at all. Perhaps it was best to stick to one of the three, to give the film unified focus, but it still makes things feel structurally left dangling. Doubtless the round pigs, the shaggy-dog bar conversations, the Stalin-era meat preserved in a vast freezer at 28º (below?), the large dolls whose heads are made of chewed bread, are all products of the fevered imagination of Vladimir Sorokin. So too are the repetitions of doubling, doubling scenes, twins, the fantastic clone tales, hinting that the world has gone mad and gone bad. Unfortunately the barking dogs, the endless trek cross-country to a wake peopled by colorful locals already had the quality of déjâ-vu, maybe because I've recently seen similar sequences in Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and the Bulgarian Konstantin Bojanov's Avé, and I think I've seen it before that. I'll bet Emir Kosturica did some sequence like this somewhere. This movie is accomplished, ambitious in its eccentricity. Some of it nonetheless reminded me of Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers. And it made me appreciate Sokurov and Zvyagintsev even more, and, in a more popular vein, Bekmambetov, who's an entertainer and a technical dazzler, and no slouch in the surrealism department. Certainly, though, "4" is very much in the Russian vein. The sound design, though typically grating and overblown, is technically the film's most original aspect.
