While
showing considerable technical skill, this debut from 30-year-old
Muscovite Khrjanovsky is seriously annoying in its efforts
to avoid both coherent structure and any point at which
viewers can engage with the story.
It opens
with a stunning long-shot (Khrjanovsky is clearly a Bela
Tarr lover, but without Tarr's tenacity) featuring four
dogs chased from their slumber by heavy machinery. From
here we meet three people who lie to each other in a bar:
Marina (Marina Vovchenko) is a hooker who passes herself
off as a PR executive; Oleg (Laguta) is a meat salesman
who claims to provide mineral water to the Kremlin; and
Vladimir (Shnurov) is a piano-tuner who says he works for
a top-secret government cloning project.
The
film is clearly examining the power of numbers, and the
way the number four echoes throughout humanity, which has
been undermined by industry. This would be a fine theme
to examine (Bela Tarr again!), except that Khrjanovsky totally
loses focus on his story. After the surprisingly riveting
30-minute bar scene, he follows Marina back to her isolated
home village for the funeral of one of her three sisters
and the crisis this presents to the local doll-making business.
And here we stay for the rest of the film, briefly checking
in with Oleg and Vladimir for updates on their tortured
stories, which make little sense.
The
acting is raw, natural and extremely brave, as Khrjanovsky
requires his cast to do fairly vile things, especially the
old women who get drunk at the wake, devour a dead pig and
end up partially naked. Many of these scenes seem almost
documentary-like, as if Khrjanovsky simply gave his non-actors
lots of vodka and filmed the results. Other scenes feature
flashes of genius--clever parallels, repetitive imagery,
inventive camera work, a constant sense of degraded humanity
until people are no better than scavenging dogs. But neither
the writing nor direction draws anything meaningful from
this. And as the film rambles on far too long, it's so disjointed
and indulgent that the audience simply loses the will to
live. Which is perhaps the entire point.
