One of those sloooow Russian films. Saw it first a good few years back at The Exeter Picture House (in an audience of about 8) I liked it well enough then to rent it from the library last year and make a copy. I know its going to be meditatively melancholic (hence why I’m sitting lotus-like in a darkened room)
Yes, long extended takes; 1 1/2 minutes to slowly zoom in on boy sat facing out on the racketty floor of a freight train. Slow tracking shots of trains in transit, walking to somewhere; to suggest the movement necessary to make a journey. But some scenes seem unneccesarily overdrawn: 3 mins of hanging washing out on the line? It’s dialogue-light, plenty of static camera, using only stingy natural light shot in late autumn; to strip back visuals into a denuded desolated misery drabness.
Widowed father with 11 year old son. Loses job. Life hits the vodka. A neglectful parent. Luckily, son has grown up smart and sane he thinks.
Off to walk to Koktebel in The Crimea with 2 backpacks, and no money. On the way is some soup, some smokes, a boiled egg, boiled sausage, bread, – and yes, vodka. Vodka sozzling is the national route to early death in Russia.
Father is soon on the sozzle again. Son is fed-up.
Directors claim they don’t want to have the camera sat admiring landscapes: “For us “Beauty of the frame” was forbidden. We wanted simplicity and laconicism”
And yet this is a beauty of the frame moment
Boy and girl smoking fags sat fronting the spindly legs of birch saplings.
Father gets shot in shoulder, needs nursing. A woman is at hand to heal him. Also happens to be a doctor. Also happens to be living on her own. Also happens to be attractive and seemingly available. Fortuitous. Father has shacked up with her. “All you do is fuck” shouts son. “Idiot” says Father. Why does son want to go to Koktebel anyway? Because he doesn’t want to stay here, being neglected, feeling unwanted.
Yet another film that loses it in its final third. Boy going off onto Koktebel on his own doesn’t really make any emotional sense. Would a little 11 year old boy leave his dad to set off into the insecure unknown like this? No, I’m not buying it. Loss of father puts too much focus on the little boy to carry the film forward. We need his dad around for him to bounce off.
The choice of Chick Corea’s Childens Songs as a recurrent mood-motif gets to feel too twinkly twee. Some dark Russian ambient electronica might have worked better.
The father turning up on the jetty in the final scene is too “filmy” (as in, the kind of neat ending that only happens in films, to tie and tidy up a final denoument)
I’ve become vaguely dissatisfied, disappointed, by this film come the end.
Dir: Boris Khlebnikov, Aleksey Popogrebskiy, Russia
6.5/10
Windows on the World 