The Stoker (2013, made in 2010)

Back in March, I saw a film called Stoker, mainly because Chan-wook Park directed it. What I found was a film so devoid of meaning, importance or interest that I decided not to bother reviewing it. Oddly, I feel the same about Alexey Balabanov’s The Stoker but this time I have decided not to be lazy and to go ahead and review it.

Mayor Ivan Skryabin (Mikhail Skryabin) served in Afghanistan in the 1980s but was discharged following a concussion. Through Misha (Aleksandr Mosin), a former colleague in the army, Ivan has got a job as a stoker, fuelling a huge furnace underneath a gangster hideout. Misha is a hit man, who sends Ivan a steady supply of corpses for disposal in the furnace. Ivan is aware of these crimes but blithely continues with the work, sleeping in a small bed next to the furnace and writing a novel set in his native Yakutia. Ivan and Misha both have daughters, Sasha and Masha (Aida Tumutova and Anna Korotaeva respectively), who share a fur trading business. Misha and his big, near-silent partner Bizon (Yuri Matveev) kill a series of people and Ivan disposes of the bodies until he can no longer turn a blind eye.

The film is almost relentlessly trivial, with writer-director Balabanov almost trying his best to avoid anything meaningful. Early in the film, Balabanov amuses himself by cutting suddenly from a quiet, often slow-paced scene to a graphic sex scene three times, intended to shock but instead feeling only embarrassingly juvenile. To keep things offbeat, the film is almost entirely scored with a folksy pop soundtrack, which make light of the frequent killings while the sober camerawork looks on with minimal participation. There are a lot of twists and turns, with unexpected killings and sudden blasts of violence but once one is accustomed to them they become fairly predictable and only succeed in distancing the audience further. Despite the use of hit men and violence, however, the film looks and feels like an art house film, moving slowly with an emphasis on dead time and steady, long takes. This stifles any potential comedy but also serves to highlight how silly the film is. The Stoker is then, as a result, a film that can neither be taken seriously nor as dopey, deranged fun. In this sense, it feels oddly unique but, equally, hopelessly derivative.

The Coen brothers (who feel like an influence here) have made a few films that try their best not to be taken seriously. At worst, these films would be cold-hearted, unlikeable but also quite dull. In fact, their recent films, ignoring Burn After Reading, suggest that they have turned away from unrewarding idiosyncrasies such as The Hudsucker Proxy, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers and the Ethan Coen-scripted The Naked Man­ – The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou get away with it because they are funny. The Stoker, however, is proudly out-of-step and resolutely pointless.

Or is it? There is a hint of a meaning in the subject of Ivan’s novel about a Russian exile, Kostya, who beats a Yakut man and then rapes his wife, both second-class citizens under Tsarist Russia. Ivan reads from his novel several times and the film ends with a short adaptation of this story, recalling oddly enough the prologue to A Serious Man, further suggesting its significance. Ivan clearly sees himself and his daughter is like the Yakut couple in the story, tolerated by the Russians until they cease being useful. There is then a parallel that can be drawn with the also frequently mentioned war in Afghanistan, which Ivan and Misha took part in, though in significantly different ways – Ivan in the thick of the action and Misha far away with a sniper rifle. The ease with which the former soldiers have turned into gangsters also seems telling, as if there is a suggestion that there is little difference between violence during wartime and criminal violence. However, as much meaning as there may or may not be in the film becomes rather irrelevant since everything else in the film is so adamantly disposable.

The Stoker was probably not worth reviewing since films that are not worth talking about are rarely worth writing about. It is a strange film that might reward a second viewing or might shed more light if one was more familiar with Yakut history or Balabanov’s other work, but as it stands on first impression, it is pretty vacuous and not worth wasting the time.

REVIEW: Elena (2012)

Elena is the third film from director Andrei Zvyagintsev (The Return and The Banishment), a slow drama that raises some difficult moral questions and contains some great performances.

Elena (Nadejda Markina) is a middle-aged housewife in modern day Russia, who has married up. Her husband Vladimir (Andrei Smirnov) is much richer than her and her family, including her son Sergei (Alexei Rozine) from a previous relationship and his family, whom Vladimir refuses to support financially. Elena and Vladimir barely communicate with controversial topics either avoided or addressed only in notes left next to his separate bed. When Sergei asks Elena to help fund his son Sasha’s (Igor Ogourstsov) university fees and hence avoid being drafted into the army, Elena has to get the money somehow and Vladimir won’t help.

Elena opens with a near two-minute shot, which recurs at the end of the film, showing the side of Elena and Vladimir’s flat as the sun rises in real time. It acts, much like the opening shot of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, somewhat comically, as the director’s shorthand for communicating to the audience that they had better get into a contemplative mood fairly soon, because the film won’t have any of the traditional Hollywood pleasures. Though the shot does have its aesthetic merits, it is quietly mesmerizing and quite beautiful in its way, it is a little too much of a director’s indulgence and a bit of an art house cliché, not unlike the shot that lingers on a nurse making a hospital bed after the patient has left. Elena establishes itself from the very beginning as an art house film, almost self-consciously.

However, the plot resembles more the pulp fiction of James M. Cain (note that Elena is a retired nurse), no surprise since Cain has influenced many writers and filmmakers all over the world, from Luchino Visconti to Albert Camus. The plot unravels slowly and methodically, with Zvyagintsev more interested in the moral and socio-political implications of Elena’s, and others’, acts. Though that is not to say that the film is cold and clinical, as Nadejda Markina proves more than capable of giving the drama an emotional power despite the distancing devices. Elena becomes, as a result, a beautifully visual film with an emotional heart and a contemplative and critical eye. What lets it down is really what Andrei Zvyagintsev and his co-writer Oleg Negin seem to want to say with it.

The film is dark at its core, suggesting that all humans are essentially self-serving and arrogant. Vladimir and his daughter Katerina (Elena Liadova) are emotional cripples and have nothing but contempt for the world and for the people in it. Sergei and Sasha are useless and stupid and do little of value. Sasha, it turns out is openly violent to those even lower down the social order than himself, in a visceral scene in which he and his mates battle a group of homeless men. And Elena, though seemingly so modest and charitable, ends up being the most morally compromised and criminal character. Zvyagintsev paints all of the characters critically but offers no real alternative or credo of his own. Worse still, he seems to openly side with Vladimir and Katerina, presenting them as emotionally cold and cynical, yet ultimately wise and articulate. In fact in one scene between Vladimir and Katerina, they come to an understanding and a rapprochement, one of the film’s few warm scenes. Their worldviews are grim and nihilistic but they find comfort in their agreement. On the other hand, Elena’s family are presented as stupid, practically monosyllabic or thuggish. When, by the end of the film, Vladimir and Katerina have been removed from the picture and Elena has ascended to prominence, bringing along Sergei and Sasha, it is hard not to feel that Zvyagintsev sees them as uncultured louts, represented through their constant watching of daytime television and drinking. There is more than an air of snobbery in this representation and the ending is an uncomfortable critique of class upward-mobility. It is difficult to tell how much of this to take seriously, but if the film had been made by, or at least championed by, a Conservative MP it would be critically mauled. One scene played for laughs, in which Sergei and his wife Tatiana (Evgenia Konushkina) announce that they are pregnant with yet another baby, seems to be illustrating the same ridiculous arguments made by John Ward in 2008.

Who says that the art house isn’t the place for right-wing films? Nevertheless, Elena is that strangest of films, that is modernist in form and full of great performances and made with an eye for composition and beauty and with an obvious artistic intent and yet manages to be if not stupid then poorly thought out. The argument it makes at the level of class is at the very least insensitive, but on a social level, the film is merely celebrating nihilism like it was fashionable. Zvyagintsev, through his many references to Andrei Tartovsky, is clearly interested in the idea of the director-philosopher, but he seems to celebrate nothing other than snobbery. Intellectual superiority seems to be his only value; one that he seems to believe is the preserve of the rich.

FILM REVIEW: Don Quixote (1957)

Along with G. W. Pabst’s Adventures of Don Quixote, Grigori Kozintse’s Russian version of Don Quixote is one of the few successful adaptations of the classic Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes, with versions by such greats as Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam left unfinished. Made in 1957 in the Crimean region, Kozintse’s version is a faithful rendition of the hilarious and often touching, if long-winded, story.

Nikolai Cherkasov plays the lead, looking exactly as one would imagine The Knight of the Rueful Countenance. Yuri Tolubeyev is equally well cast as Sancho Panza, his squire. Set in 17^th century Spain, Alonso Quijano (Cherkasov) is a middle-aged Spanish gentleman, who has a fondness of books of chivalry. These books infect his reasoning and he comes to believe that he is a knight-errant himself. He renames himself Don Quixote, places a battered shaving bowl on his head, enlists Sansho Panza as his squire and sets forth on his trusty steed Rocinante in search of adventure. His deeds are enacted in honour of a local farm girl Aldonsa (Lyudmila Kasyanova), who he renames Dulcinea del Toboso, his great love and the most beautiful woman in the world.

Don Quixote and Sansho Panza get into a series of increasingly violent and humiliating situations, whether they are ineffectually protecting a young shepherd (S. Tsomayev) from a beating or being made the butt of cruel jokes by a series of disbelievers. As they continue, Quixote’s childlike faith begins to crumble.

Cervantes’ novel is a very funny read, but it is also very touching, with Don Quixote’s innocence and faith often falling prey to a procession of cruel pranksters. Don Quixote is essentially a madman, but he is also a man who wants to make the world a better place and his attempts to do so are overwhelmed by the cruelty and inhumanity around him. Kozintse’s film is a very respectful adaptation of the novel’s major themes, but it also a skilful balancing act. While the film is often funny, particularly during the first third, it never feels like it is laughing at Don Quixote, but more sympathetically observing a deluded but fundamentally kind-hearted man. His bewilderment at the cruelty of a world in which chivalry is but a subject for disreputable books and money is the highest purpose is carefully presented and is much more memorable than the admittedly funny pratfalls.

Cherkasov is a fantastic Don Quixote and an inspired choice. Those familiar with Russian cinema might recognise the actor from playing the title roles in Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and the Ivan the Terrible films, making his Don Quixote a spoof of his more powerful performances. Yuri Tolubeyev is a fantastic sidekick, giving Panza a not-uncritical faith in his master, which makes their friendship and growing dependence all the more convincing. Cherkasov and Tolubeyev, like Don Quixote and Sansho Panza in the book, are a great double act, being a mix of the straight man and the funny man, their idiosyncrasies nicely complementing each other.

Where the film does fall down, the slightly incongruous Russian soundtrack aside, is in the pacing. The film can’t help but be episodic but it often feels wandering, almost like a sketch film. The film is particularly ponderous in an extended sequence within the court of the Duke and Duchess (Bruno Frejndlikh and Lidiya Vertinskaya). Oddly, many of the best scenes of the book have been excised, such as the Don’s encounter with a herd of sheep, which he takes to be an army of giants, although admittedly this would probably not work half as well on camera. The film does take some liberties with the story, often to good effect, although the placement of the famous tilting at windmills sequence is debatably a miscalculation. Though it is very well handled in itself, its placement within the narrative feels somewhat like a regression in the character.

The film, like the novel, is often philosophical in nature, providing a humanist message about the importance of ideals and of helping people in need. The message is presented skilfully, less as a series of dull speeches, but more from within the film itself. Ingrained within Kozintse’s Don Quixote is a critique of the modern world, which speaks as much of Stalinist Russia (the film was made four years after his death) as it does of today. Don Quixote has an almost dual identity of prophet and madman, a tension that makes the film as philosophically satisfying as it is dramatically.

The film is also lovely to look at, shot in colour and in widescreen, Sovscope to be precise. The camera is pleasingly mobile as is typical in Russian cinema, such as in Sergey Bondarchuk’s monumental 1967 adaptation of War & Peace. The comic timing is near perfect, especially in an early sequence in which Don Quixote tests his new helmet on a terrified Sansho Panza. Towards the end, the film is lyrical and moving, with the finale a muted yet touching and oddly hopeful farewell.

Grigori Kozintse, if not entirely successful, has managed to make a heartfelt and witty adaptation of the Cervantes novel. The film has a real visual flair and well-rounded characterisations. Though it is let down by a plot that is rather unmanageable in filmic terms, the film does justice to the original story and has many interesting ideas of its own. The performances are fantastic and if Terry Gilliam ever does manage to realize his own ambitious version of the knight from La Mancha, he will be hard pressed to find anyone better than Cherkasov and Tolubeyev.