At its lowest, most repetitive points, such as with Raskolnikov wandering the streets of Saint Petersburg for the upteenth time with no destination planned and not a coherent thought in his head, Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment" may, indeed, bare some similarities to Aleksandr Sokurov's arthouse twaddle, "Whispering Pages"--a picture of utter pretensions full of affected images incoherently and lethargically arranged. Sparsed in between the filmmaker's experiments with alternating between black-and-white photography and a color scheme that barely registers beyond the grayscale, stilted acting and awkward posturing, misty views and water reflections, slow motion, soft focus, stretched images, scenes of men lifting other men and a bizarre crescendo involving the molestation of a statue, the film highlights a few scenes from Dostoevsky's book.
The picture begins after its literary source, with the Raskolnikov type returning to the place where he committed murder. Thereafter, there are some fleeting moments regarding the cat-and-mouse game between him and the police and a reference to Sonya's dead father. The most complete sequence involves Raskolnikov's confession to Sonya. I doubt the narrative would make much sense to anyone unfamiliar with the novel, which would be fine if there were true art here in the imagery and structure instead of languid obfuscation.
I've been seeking out a few adaptations after reading Dostoevsky's story, and I did myself no favors by choosing this as the next film to view after "Norte, the End of History" (2013), which is another ponderous reworking of said material. At least, and this is an important benefit, "Whispering Pages" is significantly shorter than Lav Diaz's four-hours-plus, appropriately-labelled piece of "slow cinema." And, by the way, if you want to see an actual artistic film adaptation of "Crime and Punishment," seek the 1923 Expressionist silent film "Raskolnikow," or Robert Bresson's French New Wave classic "Pickpocket" (1959), or the actually painted animated short "Zbrodnia i kara" (2000).
