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04.07.07
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A Russian Focus
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By Paul Abelsky
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Moscow Film Festival Honors Works with Links to Russia and Former Soviet Union
The 29th Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) ended last Saturday night with a final splash of glamour and exuberance, as the assortment of guests gathered to salute the festival’s winners. For the third time in four years, a Russian movie – Vera Storozheva’s “Traveling with Pets” – came away with the Golden George, the event’s main prize, a selection that was contentious but expected.
Following closely behind Sochi’s Kinotavr festival in early June, and the respected international gatherings in Cannes and Venice, the scope, direction and substance of Moscow’s cinema celebration seemed adrift this year, with an underwhelming main competition and a mixed array of other films. Managerial difficulties meant that the program was assembled in just three months – an astonishing feat considering the festival’s scale – but the event’s organization and conduct left much to be desired. Nonetheless, even though the MIFF is still searching for a creative identity, many of the Russian premieres shown over the past ten days confirmed the new-found confidence and promise of the country’s film industry.
The event has long earned a place of honor on the international movie circuit, but changing geopolitical winds have eroded its distinct appeal and status. The festival used to showcase productions of the Socialist bloc and sympathetic third-world countries, featuring movies that were rarely shown elsewhere. In more recent years, the organizers have tried to present the event as the “festival of festivals” by including breakthrough films that already appeared at other prestigious venues, but the MIFF has also continued to function as a springboard for directors from Russia and former Soviet republics.
This year was no exception. For the first time, a Ukrainian film, Eva Neymann's “At the River,” took part in the main competition. “Monotony,” a debut feature from Latvian director Juris Poskus, won the Perspectives section, while a Georgian thriller “Russian Triangle” directed by Aleko Tsabadze, was awarded a special jury prize. In fact, winners of four of the main prizes each had some post-Soviet component. Italian Giuseppe Tornatore prevailed as the best director for “The Unknown Woman,” with a Russian actress Kseniya Rapoport in the lead role of a tormented Ukrainian sex slave stranded in Italy.
The human dimension of the aftershocks that followed the Soviet collapse – probing personal crises, fractured lives and diasporas spawned after the empire’s disintegration – seemed to be one of the festival’s implicit themes. Despite a shoddy quality and feeble screenplay, “The Children of CCCP” by Russian-Israeli director Felix Gerchikov placed the conflicted lives of Russian immigrants in Israel in the foreground, pining for the old country and estranged from their adopted homeland, yet developing an identity all of their own. A gritty Austrian movie Import/Export focused on two converging storylines, one tracing the desperate path of a Ukrainian nurse who runs off to Austria to make ends meet, while also following the life of an Austrian misfit who embarks on a trip through the Ukrainian borderland.
The festival hosted a Russian premiere of last year’s international hit “The Lives of Others,” directed by a young German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. The film offered incisively portrayed East Germany’s twilight years, overseen by the vigilant and obsessive Stasi secret police keeping a disconcertingly close watch over wayward citizens.
The underlying narrative of redemption may have made the movie particularly pleasing for Western audiences, but the festival’s organizers aptly included several other films that demonstrate how surveillance of private lives has outlasted Communist fixations and endured to our day. “Red Road,” a joint British-Danish production, surveyed the lives of those who fall within the range of omniscient security cameras in Scotland. The distorting dynamic between custodians of public order and their quarry on closed circuit television screens takes on a different meaning in today’s Britain than it did in East Germany, but the Orwellian machinery of panoptic control seems to have no bounds.
The main competition also included a Russian take on these dilemmas. Not surprisingly, surreptitious means of surveillance serve private ends in this country. “Nothing Personal,” directed by Larisa Sadilova, is a story of a private detective commissioned to snoop on the seemingly mundane life of a woman for devious reasons he does not understand. He mounts cameras in her apartment and attempts to piece together the drama in her life only to find out that he has been pursuing the wrong target. Redirecting his undercover apparatus on a woman next door, who is carrying on an illicit affair with a shadowy local politician, the hired detective cannot simply withdraw from his previous subject of surveillance, drawing closer and eventually converting their virtual relationship into a real one. “Nothing Personal” was presented a special prize by FIPRESCI, the International Federation of Film Critics.
Indeed, despite the abundance of worthy foreign participants at the festival, ranging from Emir Kusturica’s latest jolly extravaganza “Promise Me This” to a new feature “Tracks” by a French director Claude Lelouch, the diverse new crop of Russian films made a particularly strong showing. With the exception of a few period dramas, the most striking domestic productions indulged in contemplative narratives devoid of specific historical context, but successfully delivering powerful and evocative spectacles.
One of the true disappointments, however, was Pavel Lungin’s “Lilacs,” an account of the life of the famed pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, with affected acting performances and an unfitting general tenor. Another oddity was “Agitation Brigade ‘Beat the Enemy!’” by a veteran director Vitaly Melnikov. It tells a story of a hastily assembled propaganda unit, composed of exiled artists and actors in the waning months of the Second World War, sent on a mission down a remote Siberian waterway to spread the triumphalist word of Soviet military feats among isolated communities. Although based on Melnikov’s own memories of a similar undertaking, the elaborate storyline is strained and incongruous. Still, the film includes moving scenes of encounters with boats transporting Kalmyk and Baltic deportees to the Siberian netherworld, an appalling operation decreed by Stalin but never before openly presented this way on screen, as well as the self-styled propagandists’ interaction with the banished Volga Germans and Orthodox sects who have found a sanctuary in the most inaccessible and far-flung places.
But while historical themes animate the work of several directors, the most absorbing Russian premieres have almost willfully done away with any such references, chronicling imaginative, timeless and elusive narratives of human predicament. “Fishing Season,” directed by Valery Ogorodnikov and completed after his untimely death, converges on the drama in a small fishing village. Behind the routine commotion are anguished romantic liaisons which show people pulled by forces seemingly beyond their control.
“The Horror That’s Always With You,” directed by Arkady Yakhnis and based on a masterful screenplay by Yury Arabov, strikes a different, Kafka-esque tone. In an absurdist turn of events, a disgruntled couple’s apartment is taken over by a special forces unit for reasons that remain all-important but unknowable. Proceeding through stages of defiance, ironic resignation and epiphany, the bewildered tenants come not only to accommodate their unwelcome guests but develop a sort of co-dependency that leads them to reassess their humdrum lives.
The MIFF’s eventual winner, Vera Storozheva’s “Traveling with Pets,” revolved around Kseniya Kutepova’s magnetic performance as a withdrawn and unruly young widow living next to a secluded railroad outpost. Despite the cutting scenes of her outbursts and pained struggle to communicate with others, Kutepova’s heroine retains an enigmatic force of character that drives the narrative to its open-ended and brooding conclusion.
Although the film was voted a favorite among viewers, its selection was not without a whiff of controversy. Russian star actress and jury member Renata Litvinova was known for her early association with Storozheva, and Litvinova is rumored to have played the decisive role in choosing the movie for the main prize. At the closing ceremony, Nikita Mikhalkov, MIFF’s president, seemed more enthused about the festival’s numerical achievements – 200 films shown in ten days and seen by around 100,000 viewers – than the substance of the event. Despite the uneven program and persistent organizational troubles, however, audiences around the country can look forward to engaging new productions to be released in the months ahead. |
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