Film – Page 4 – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

HANG ON IN THERE! : The film OTRYV (BREAKAWAY).

Does the video for Wham’s `Last Christmas` make you retch? The antidote is this new winter-break-from-Hell flick.

`It wasn’t like this for George Michael!`
[mobi.com]

There had been little advance publicity for the release of Otryv (Breakaway). The film’s appearance in the cinemas had first been scheduled for January 24th – this is very much a New Year’s tale after all. In the event, however it got its first public screening on February 14th. This was fitting too as, with its romantic subplot, the film could function as a date movie.

Two days into its release the audience at the suburban cinema in Zhulebino reached double figures and contained a mix of ages. Perhaps the word was already out that we had a winner here – for winner it is.

High Suspense.
This 16+ certificate tale of peril over the snowy mountain tops, a suspense-disaster-action-thiller, delivers just the right fist-gnawing -how-will-they-get-out-of-that? -thrill.
It proceeds from a high concept premise: a group of kids marooned on a stalled cable car in freezing weather conditions.

Directed and in part penned by Tigran Sahahkyan- whose main claim to greatness comes from having directed a much awarded movie short called Haroshoya Rabota (Nice Work) five years ago – Otryv can be viewed as Adrift meets Touching the Void, with the entrapment of the first and sense of vertigo of the other.

Bright idea.
On a winter break in the Urals, a merry band of sporty twenty-something friends, three boys and two girls, decide to see the New Year in on a funicular. The aim is to reach the top of a mountain and then descend back to base with their snowboards.
To this end they come to a private arrangement with an old cable car operator (Vladimir Gusev).

The crazy venture goes to plan until the grizzled old machinist has an accident which results in him getting tangled up and then killed by the machinery. Suspended above a ravine, the cable car grinds to a halt in mid air – while below them all of nearby civilisation is deep in revelry….

From here the narrative piles on further calamities in an uncompromising way. A hatch blows open, an attempt to lower one of them to the ground with a rope results in death, there is a snowstorm and – as is the convention – one of the party turns out to be a bit of a dementoid. Confinement, heights, subzero temperatures and conflict are all rolled into one.

Meanwhile, one of the party has been left behind on the ground, following a spat with his girlfriend. As he sulks in their hotel he comes to realise, little by little that something is up. Can he become their saviour?

Brat pack?
The young cast act with conviction but the one who stands out is the thirty year old Mikhail Fillipov. He is the crazed one and he embraces this dislikable role with commendable gusto.

Ingrid Olyenskaya, 26, made her name as the cynical schoolgirl in the cult comedy film Neadekvatnye Ludi (Inadequate People) from 2010 and, likewise, her on-screen lover, 34-year-old Denis Kozyakov has a face much seen in light comedies.

Andrey Nasimov plays the jilted lover-cum-rescuer. He is something of a cinema heart-throb, having played the lead in Chernaya Molniya (Black Lightning) back in 2009.

Irina Antonenko gets to play the queen bee of the story. This beauty contest trophy holder nevertheless has notched up some significant film roles. In 2012 she turned up in The Darkest Hour, an alien invasion scenario made by a Western producer, which just happened to be set in Moscow. Then three years ago she lent her charms to Krasnaya, an intriguing `Ostern` (or `Red Western`).
One of the film’s strength is the exotic locale. The cinematographer Sergey Dysnuk, who has been the lensman for two anticipated science fiction movies due ot this year – Project Gemini and Koma – has brought out the majesty of the sbowbound peaks here.

This ambience is enhanced by an airy synthesiser keyboard score courtesy of Alexei Chinchoff. This in turn is interspersed with Western pop music, such as some solo work by Chris Martin.
If the production can be called `slick` – it is so in a good way.

“`Death not in the mountains!` The slogan of the film.
[C.T.B films/ Attraktion]

A trend.
The Russian big screen has flirted with catastrophe thrillers before. In 2013 the superb Metro, in which a Moscow carriage gets trapped undergorund following a flooding, had real impact. The three years later the blockbuster Ekipazh (Aircrew) arrived. Attempting a revival of the Airport-type franchise this brought volcanoes, earthquakes and lightning storms into the proceedings.
You might also include Ledokol (Icebreaker) (2016), a fact based docudrama a about a nuclear ice breaker which becomes locked in the ice of the Arctic.

(My review of Ekipazh and Ledokol (for `Moskvaer`) here and here).

Not a `feelgood movie`.
Those films offered heroic adventures for family audiences. Not so Otryv, which, from its baleful big red title onwards, borrows a lot from the horror genre.
The scenario of a posse of high-spirited college kids being picked off one by one is the most obvious scary movie cliché on show here.

Then we have two popcorn-on-the -floor nightmare sequences from which the heroine awakes with a start. In addition, the use of live video links by phone where the characters appear to speak directly to the camera, whilst in real-time, seems like a nod to the `found footage` subgenre.
(Also the cable car is named `The Overlook`. A reference to the hotel in `The Shining`?)

So is the film just a white knuckle ride? Perhaps, but whether intended or not, you can view this, without much forcing, as an allegorical depiction of the middle class youth of todays’ Russia. They have been abandoned by their elders and left to fend for themselves in hostile circumstances. Left hanging.

Could travel.
Still Otryv, more than any other recent Russian film I have watched, mirrors its American counterparts. The Urals-wintersport backdrop may give it freshness, but otherwise there can be found little intrinsic `Russianess` to the movie. It could sell well in America and Europe. As much as it is early days, it would have to be a good thriller for me not to see this as the best film of its kind from this year.

The Trailer.

Official website (English).

Bad Dreams with no Boundaries: the film`RASSVET` (`SUNRISE`/`QUIET IS THE DAWN`)`)

`YOU WON’T WAKE UP!` A lugubrious chiller based around lucid dreaming ushers in this year’s batch of Russian screen scares.

The Moscow movie goers who arrived to check out Rassvet (`Sunrise` AKA `Quiet Is the Dawn`) when it screened at the end of January may well have experienced a bit of deja vu.

This latest in the new cycle of horror flicks to spook Russia tells of a Tragic Young Woman who is Subject to Terrifying Dreams Involving Family Members.

Remind you of anything? I f you have been following this blog it should have done.Provodnik from last November (reviewed below) shared the same blueprint.

However,` tragic-young-women` and so on function as standardised horror tropes ( a result of producers playing to the audience demographic, I suppose) and this competent 16+ certificate supernatural chiller handles them in a different way to that Alexandra Bortich vehicle.

Newbies and Veterans.
The director – Pavel Sidorov from Saint Petersburg – as well as the lead actress – Alexandra Drozdova – constitute relative newcomers.

The producers however – Dmitry Litvinov and Vladislav Severtsev -can claim credit for Nevesti (`The Bride`) from three years back, a watershed for Russian horror cinema owing to its box office takings. Less noteworthy is Severtsev’s involvement in some tosh churned out by Television 3 called Battle of the Psychics which purported to show real events. (The promotional poster for this film seems to imagine this to be a selling point!)

The man behind the plot and the script, meanwhile, had also worked on Vurdalaki (2017) (`Ghouls`), a dark fantasy extravaganza.

Oksana Akinshina is a further luminary who got roped in. This 32-year-old actress from St Petersburg, who appeared in The Bourne Supremacy (2004) , only really has a cameo part here, as the late mother of the heroine, yet her name has been shoved to the front of the publicity material as a stamp of class.

Alexandra Drosdova in her screen debut.[kg-portal.ru]

Nightmare on Vyaz Ulitsa.
Sveta is a young woman beset by nightmares involving her mother who she lost in childhood. Only her brother, who seems to be the last surviving member of her family, is around to comfort her when she wakes up screaming.

What then happens one harrowing night, though, is that this young man steps out from the window of their shared flat, plunging to his instant death below….

The corresponding grief of Sveta is portrayed with a brilliant poetic image: we see her sitting on a sofa which is also at the bottom of an open grave. Mourners throw clods of earth onto her from above. (Sidorov has a background in television commercials and this might explain his yen for metaphorical imagery).

Sveta later discovers that her brother was implicated in a sinister cult going by the name of `Dawn`. Her fearful nightmares persist until a loyal friend intervenes.

She encourages Sveta to sign up for a session at the Institute of Somnology in a forested area somewhere outside the city (the narrative is vague about locations).

Here a psychiatry professor, employing state-of-the art technologies, will guide her through `therapeutic` lucid dreams.

There are three other guinea pigs for this experiment: a man tramautised by a fire he escaped played by 49 year old Oleg Vasilkov (Convoy 2012) and a woman who (we learn) killed her own husband, a role evoked by the 39 year old Anna Slyu – who as a participant of the Daywatch and Nightwatch franchise is an old hand at this sort of thing.

Then there is a cheeky young man named Kirill whose fear turns out to be one of claustrophobia. This would-be love interest also makes his debut here (in fact I am not even sure what his name is, which is a shame because, judging from this appearance, he could be a star in the making).

Together they will become immersed in a collective lucid dream; one which will confront them with the deepest fears of all involved…

So we get treated to something like a Mad Doctor scenario, complete with a veneer of `scientism` and something more witchy and demonological. The premise, inspired by lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis, is not so new – one could go right back to Dreamscape from 1984- but it is still fresh enough to set Rassvet apart from more common spooky-convent type fare.

Oksana Akinshina guest starring in “`Rassvet`.[in-rating.ru]

Atmosphere.
What makes this film memorable is its poetic and eerie ambience. The director achieved this through the slow pace and the muted lighting.We see a lot of apprehensive creeping through corridors but jump scares are used in a sparing way and the music (courtesy of 56-year-old Londoner Gary Judd) is rather spectral.

Architecture also plays a key role in this. We get a lot of long shots of the Institute of Somnology – a sprawling moderne concrete affair in the middle-of-nowhere – which, like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, seems almost like a character in the story.

In terms of this (somewhat Russian) atmosphere, I was even reminded of the great Soviet film Solaris (1972) which also concerned dreams made manifest.

Downbeat.
Drosdova has her charms but is no vamp; she functions as more of an approachable girl-next-door than does Bortich’s Alphagirl in Provodnik.

Likewise, with its real world trappings and more focused plot, Rassvet provides more of a feel of reality than its predecessor and nor does it offer any refuge in sentimental uplift. In horror terms, it is the more effective film of the two, even if it seems sombre to a fault.

With little advance publicity through leaflets and posters, I learnt of this film through the interweb alone. Perhaps the producers are relying on sales in the keen Asian market. Indeed I was at the first showing and joining me was a contingent of four Chinese students, who formed a quarter of the audience that night.

The Trailer (English subtitles).

First Barbarians at the Gates: the film LETO (SUMMER).

Precious but eye-brow raising: the celebrated glimpse of a time when Soviet Youth was toying with Western decadence.

Welcome to the Leningrad of the early Eighties and the bands of the Rock Club that emerged there. Part biopic/docudrama and part musical, this monochrome film which opened in Cannes last May to much fanfare, concerns the (fictionalised) life and times of Viktor Tsoi, lead singer of Kino and Mike Naumenko the vocalist with blue-rock band Zoo Park.

These `U.S.S.R punks` were smitten with Western rock and so, uniformed in denim and shades, tried to live for the moment, swigging wine and puffing cigs in the way they imagined their Western counterparts had done 15 years earlier.We see them haggling over Western rock posters in markets and getting hassled by old-timers on train journeys.

Many of their elders indulged them, however, and the Soviet authorities let them play their stuff – most of it on acoustic guitars and recorded on reel-to-reel tape recorders –provided it was their own work. We can be thankful for this edict because the music of Tsoi’s Kino is as timeless as it is Russian, even though nudged a bit by the likes of Joy Division.

It seems somehow fitting that many of these artisans, Tsoi and Naumenko included, were to die young just before the Soviet period, which they had chaffed against, drew to a close.

The brainchild of this innovative movie is the outspoken Putin critic Kirill Serebrinnikov who is notorious for being under house arrest for supposed `embezzlement` – a situation which came into force during the making of this film.

He has brought the Russian rock star’s restricted milieu to life by use of quasi-avant garde flourishes. Leto features hand painted graphics, on screen lyrics, and abrupt vaudevillian rock turns the songs of Talking Heads, Bowie, and Iggy Pop.

Real life rock vocalist Roman Bilyk (of power-pop group Zveri) takes the role of Mika Naumanko and does so with able nonchalance. The difficult task of becoming the iconic Viktor Tsoi fell to the Korean-German actor Teo Yoo who had to say his lines in Russian despite not having any of that language!

However not even the addition of Irina Starshenbaum (Attraction) as the object of a love mix-up involving Tsoi and Naumenko, can disguise the fact that Leto is formless and overlong, (in particular if one is not fluent in Russian).

What saves Leto is its stylistic playfulness some of which even startled me, and of course the music proves enlivening, although I would like to have heard less of the old Western party pieces and more from Kino.

This film resembles Aleksey German’s film Dovlatov from earlier the same year.Both films brood over the well-known problems of earlier times. Perhaps it is time for Russian film makers to look forward.

The trailer.

`Leto` by Kino

PROVODNIK (SOUL CONDUCTOR).

This blood-and-thunder paranormal thriller provides a showcase for Russia’s new poster girl.

Katya may look like any ordinary city gal but she has a very busy life. She is an empath who consorts with the dead and becomes plagued by ominous visions. She is still dealing with the trauma of her parent’s death by car crash when she was a child. She gets drawn to a spooky mansion where she once witnessed a demonic rite play out. Her dead twin sister returns to her to warn her that her own killer – a serial killer – is still on the loose. Turning to the police for help she finds they fail to believe her. Well, would you?

Provodnik – the title just means `conductor` but is translated into Soul Conductor in English promotions – is a 16+ certificate hour and a half long blend of Dark Fantasy and Psycho-thriller. From `the Russian offices of Twentieth Century Fox` (whatever that means), the film was overseen by 48-year-old Ilya Markov who has a background in television, as do the writing duo of Anna Kurbatova and Alexandr Torpuria.

A baggy green parka modelling the latest Alexandra Bortich look.
[filmpro.ru]

Evgeny Tsyganov (Peter FM) plays the weary criminal investigator with conviction but the camera’s gaze is forever set on one Alexandra Nikolaevna Bortich. With her cornfield coloured hair, ice blue eyes and catwalk friendly physique, Bortich functions as a `Russian rose` (in fact she hails from the Gomel region of Belorussia).The woman of the moment, she looks out from the front covers of women’s magazines and is playing the lead in a TV show in Russia called An Ordinary Woman and, last year, provided the heroine for a popular romcom called I’m Losing Weight.The good ship Sasha Bortich has been well and truly launched.

The film’s tagline – `Who Can You Trust When You Can’t Even Trust Yourself?` and the producer’s claim that it `explores the fine line between reality and imagination` should give you some hint of the tale’s paranoid and even sometimes feverish ethos. Nevertheless, the word `lavish` kept springing to my mind when I considered the film’s production values.

The action – and there is enough plot material here for at least three separate films -begins from the word go and never slackens. The director juggles with a lot of cobweb covered scary movie tropes such as a decrepid old mansion in the woods, bodies floating in the air, a malevolent boy-child, a wild pack of dogs , blood and fires. Dennis Surov’s effective epic score underlines the intensity of it all meanwhile.

The breathless roller-coaster ride leaves Bortich with little to do except clutch at her temples in agonised discombobulation, ensconced all the while in a capacious green parker. (She is far from the bold temptress that she so well portrayed in Duhless 2).

Not that she is alone. She sometimes has an entourage. This consists of Departed Helpers, who prop themselves up on her furniture, visible only to her (a la Wings of Desire).

The autumnal outdoor shots and the downbeat but homely apartment interiors, together with the swigging of vodka (there is an alarming drink-driving sequence involving Tsyganov’s cop, but even Katya has a hip flask on the ready) gives a real whiff of Russianness to the whole enterprise, whatever other Hollywood cliches it may employ.

At best I was put in mind of the great Jacob’s Ladder (1990) but at times I felt I was undergoing a rerun of Nightwatch. That `first Russian blockbuster` from fourteen years back has cast a long shadow over subsequent Russian horror filmcraft.

The bombastic aspect of that fantasia is evident in the superfluous use of theatrical shock effects, including sudden fires, blood rippling over a person’s face, and people being chucked about by invisible forces. Whilst it is creditworthy that they did not use special effects to do all this, none of it seemed to either forward the plot or add to the atmosphere. The best bits in Provodnik were simple and moving: for example, Katya battering the windows of the car her parents were driving to their deaths in, to no avail.

Practitioners of Russian cinematic chillers would do well to get acquainted with the `less-is-more` principle.This applies more to the horror genre than to other things. Konvert (The Envelope) and Diggeri (Diggers) were both more satisfying for applying a certain minimalist constraint.

I, however, am not the target market for this product. This, I presume, would be young Russian women. Nevertheless, apart from a nervous whispering couple behind me, I sat alone in a central cinema on a sunday evening to watch this. Robin Good, as the Russians call it, was getting all the bums on seats.

Trailer.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (ZAVODNOI APPELSIN) at the Theatre of Nations, Moscow November 20th

O my brothers! I viddied a bezoomny horrorshow about a malenky bit of the old ultraviolence!

The play calling itself `A Clockwork Orange` (`Zavodnoi Appelsin`) seems to have become a permanent fixture in the schedules of Moscow’s Theatre of Nations. My previous attempts to get tickets for it had failed and this evening, courtesy of a whole load of thirty-somethings, was a full house.
I need to say at the outset that what I saw was very much a conceptual spin-off from Anthony Burgess’s sensational novel of 1962 and by no means an adaptation of it, or even of Stanley Kubrick’s much vaunted 1971 screen rendering of the same. Instead this functioned as an original idea by the writers Yuriy Klavdiev and Ilia Kukharenko with the director Fillip Grigoryan. After all, the novel is unstageable (as I can testify having sat through a lame attempt to do do by drama students many years ago). The drama really concerns the genesis of the novel A Clockwork Orange and in that it resembles Ken Russel’s film Gothic (1986) which tells of how Frankenstein came to be written.
As much as this fact disconcerted me, I never got bored throughout this 1 hour 50 minute (without intermissions) production, and that is despite my less than perfect Russian language skills. Rather, I left the theatre feeling perplexed and remain so now. My only disappointment lay in not being shown the sinister glitter of a brave new world that the novel offers. The play glances back to the past.

The Moscow Connection.
Still, if you live in Moscow you already inhabit the world of A Clockwork Orange: the blocks of flats whose windows are illuminated by the flickering light of TV sets, the bars with names like `The Duke of New York`, the superannuated murals glorifying labour, the vast public video screens – not all of these are in Burgess’s story, but might as well have been.
There exists a deeper link to Russia’s capital too. Malcolm McDowell (the iconic Alex in Kubrick’s film) told of how Burgess, before writing the novel, had been on an exchange visit to Moscow. He was sitting in a coffee bar one warm evening when a group of learing thugs pressed their faces against the window (Newspunch.com, February 4th 2016). This vignette provided a catalyst for Burgess’s story and also its telling via `nadstat`, the teenage slang full of Russian loan words.

Burgess’s demon.
There was another inspiration to the novel however, and this play zooms in on it. What happened was that Burgess’s wife was assaulted, in Burgess’s absence, by American G.I’s. Many critics have hypothesised that A Clockwork Orange represented Burgess’s attempt to come to terms with the trauma that this terrible event wrought on him.
The main protagonist of the play is a Burgess-like `writer` (characterised as a beret wearing member of the intelligentsia). The incident is represented – borrowing a sequence from the novel -by the rape of his wife in a country house setting.
It is an ordinary miscreant who ends up behind bars who conjures up the demon of the `imaginary Alex` by throwing the writer into helpless introspective guilt.
Otherwise the play features the stand-off between Youth and Age (but fails to explore this in the sociological way that Burgess attempted) and there is a bit of rumination on popular culture (sixties pop music plays a big role in this production).
As for the nadstat: I had been eager to see how a Russian language production would deal with this but drew a blank. In the stage notes to the play there is an intriguing suggestion that the script used Google translate to create the feel of an artificial language, but this was lost on this Russian learner.
Sixties retro.

The set comprises a moderne country house, the inside of which we view from the garden, courtesy of a wall length sliding window. There is some attention to the detail of sixties Britain with the wife, for example, being clad in one of the flowing skirts of the period (I was reminded of the recent British play Home, I’m Darling where a couple try to recreate late fifties domesticity). We also encounter a Britishism in the form of a garden gnome. How stunned we are when this comes to life and begins to address the audience!
You would expect a bit of the old ultraviolence to get a look in too. It does. The rape sequence is prolonged and distasteful, but not cheapened with any attempt at eroticism. The most disturbing scene, however, is the grievous bodily harm committed on Alex by his elders. (It appears that theatre censorship in Russia is not as stringent as all that).

Fresh take.
There is little point in trying to give you the `plot` of this play. This is an expressionistic trip through vaudevillian sequences held together by a Strindbergian dream logic. Or to put it another way it is a bit like what you might have got if Andrei Tarkovsky rather than Kubrick had directed a film version of the novel.
In fact, the only Kubrick influence in the play comes via his film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) in the use of a Ligeti like score as the plays opening. The only iconic reference to the film occurs when Alex is given a drink of moloko (milk) by his parents.
Also we get an extended dumb show in which the writer’s wife, masked by sinister facial bandages, mimes to a sixties ballad and a surreal scene where the `imaginary Alex` turns up to the house in the form of a cyborg Black Knight – only to morph into the couple’s querulous teenage son. Later there is also a home video where Alex’s parents torture him.
Throughout there is a determination not to feel predictable or to fall into clichés. Even when Beethoven gets an airing, it is the gentler Beethoven of `The Moonlight Sonata` and not the more rousing works associated with the Kubrick film. (As I often bewail the derivative or stodgy nature of much modern Russian culture I cannot really complain about this!)
In any case, this play may be iconoclastic but it is not at all irreverent. The writers have demonstrated much concern here for the life and times of Anthony Burgess. Nor have they made the theme of violence a titillating one.
You might even see this play as something of a black comedy, although the fact that the audience did not so much as titter might owe to the fact that, like me, they would need some time to mull the whole thing over.
If you imagine that modern Russian theatre is all revivals of The Cherry Orchard then wake up and nyuhakh the kofye!

Theatre of Nations site (English).

Which Russia would YOU choose?

Chernovik (Rough Draft) : a colourful blockbuster based on the modish premise of alternate histories.

`Which world would you choose? ` was the tag-line which appeared on the promotional posters in the metro about a month before this film’s release on 27^th May this year. Best known for his dark fantasies Night Watch and Day Watch, (2004 and 2006 respectively) the fifty year old former doctor Sergey Lukyanenko has now seen his untranslated novel – Chernovik – from 13 years back also adapted for the screen.

This parallel worlds yarn has a 12+ certificate this time, but otherwise seems to be aiming at the same young adult audience.

Kirill, an ordinary young Muscovite (Nikita Volkov) who works for a computer games company, receives the shock of his life when he discovers one day that his whole identity has been erased from his known reality. A fellow gaming geek (Yevgeny Tkachuk) seems to be the only one to recognise him. Then, however a mysterious woman called Renata Ivanova welcomes him into a new role. He is now to be the curator of a way station straddling alternate variations of Moscow. His customers enter the water tower in which he resides and, should they show the right documents and pay, can exit out of another door straight in to a whole new version of reality. We glimpse a sun-soaked Moscow complete with palm trees along the river, a Moscow with steam punk airships crossing the skies, a variant of unreformed Stalinism, a sleek futuristic Chinese run Moscow, and so on.

Within all this kaleidoscopic adventure we are given a conventional romantic sub-plot as Kirrill pursues the same woman in different guises throughout switching between worlds. However, his friendship with the loyal and goofy coloured-shade- wearing fellow gamer packs much more impact.

The director Sergey Mokritsky made his name with the much more earthy Dyen Uchitelya (Teacher’s Day) (2012) but here he delivers the kind of glittery grandeur you would expect from a Lukyanenko product. It all gets very J.K. Rowling-meets-Bulgakov: in particular when there is a climatic showdown between the ruling `functionals`.

Apart from the giant killer matrioshka dolls – which are straight out of the sillier end of Doctor Who – the other most memorable thing in this flashy movie is that it graces the stately Lithuanian actress Severija Janusauskaite (last seen in a support role in satisfying psychological thriller Selfie) with a rather more fitting part as a superhuman supervisor.

Trailer here

Nikki Gogol: Superstar.

Witchcraft is afoot in the village again and Gogol must pull himself together enough to help…in the latest in this genre-busting movie series!

The distraught friends are carrying a coffin to the burial ground of Dikanka. This contains the body of Nikolai Gogol, demon-slayer. After the earth has been piled onto this, Gogol’s eyes open and, screaming, he begins the frantic scramble to escape premature burial. A departing friend hears the noise and turns in time to see a hand emerging from the grave. Gogol is back…!

Gogol: The Terrible Revenge (Gogol: Strazhnaya Mest) forms the closing act of a trilogy that introduces a fictional variant of that famed Ukrainian Man of Letters: Nikolai Gogol ( a standard bust of whom is shown above, in a random park in Vladimir). In this he is a psychic who assists a detective struggling to banish an ancient curse which had been cast on the village of Dikanka. The premise seems preposterous and I called my review (for Moskvaer) of the first in the series Sorry, Gogol. (Read it here).

The second part Gogol: Viy I even declined to see, not wanting my memory of the great Soviet horror film Viy (1967) to become besmirched.

Here we are again though! Wikipedia terms this franchise `fantasy-action-horror-mystery-thriller`. So as not to be short of breath, I would rather just say `Dark Fantasy. ` If you can imagine that Tim Burton had overdosed on Slavic folklore you would get the idea.

The I hour 50 minute long 16+ certificate film spooked cinema goers since 30^th August this year and was produced by a collaboration between Sreda Production company and the entertainment channel TV3. The latter, which is already known for its hocus-pocus content, intends to broadcast the show later as a TV serial. Indeed (according to IMDb) this constitutes the first TV show to be screened first at the cinema!

Pantomime.

The action takes place in a fairytale 1829 universe where a large cartoonish moon hangs over the village. The colours of the photography seem autumnal and muted, the actors faces pallid. The acting seems quite `stagey` but the swashbuckling glamour of the early Nineteenth Century is put across well. The cast seem to be enjoying themselves but are serious enough about it so as not to let the whole thing descend into camp parody. They are an attractive lot too: in particular the 22 year old Taisa Volkova, a sort of Russian Billy Piper, has the sort of features which you feel you could gaze at forevermore.

Witch-hunt.

There is no need for a Spoiler Alert here. The plot is serpentine and the proceedings held together by quite lengthy dialogue (making it heavy-going on this Russian learner).

Suffice to say that Gogol (Alexander Petrov) continues to be overwhelmed and discombobulated throughout as friends and lovers turn out to be in league with demons. His ebullient associate, Inspector Yakov (Oleg Menshikov) then arrives on horseback from St Petersburg with handcuffs ready to arrest these blackguards. Meanwhile, we encounter much in the way of talons extending from human fingers, infernos and swirling flocks of birds and all that sort of thing.

Hip History.

On a more educational level, we get a bit of a biography lesson as scenes from Gogol’s early work Evening on A Farm in Dikanka are interlaced with episodes of Gogol’s own life. The conceit is that these fantastical occurrences really happened to him and that he later wrote them up as fiction. It is all rather innovative, but to look for a precedent imagine Shakespeare in Love meets Van Helsing

They deliver the whole farrago with gusto – there is even a bespoke song as the credits roll by the lead singer of the group Leningrad. Even though I felt that I had viewed nothing more than a diverting side-show, nevertheless I will never quite see Nikolai Vasiliech Gogol in the same way again.

English subtitled trailer here.

`KONVERT`: a spectral odyssey through the Moscow of today.

There has been a welcome trickle of cinematic chillers issuing from Russia of late. We had the great Diggeri (Diggers) screening in 2016. Also the 35 year old Svyatoslav Podgaevsky has carved a niche for himself as a horror flick practitioner with Pikova Dama (Queen of Spades) from 2015, and, from last year Nevesta (The Bride) plus Ruslka: Ozero Mortvykh (Mermaid: Lake of the Dead) from this year At more of a pinch there is also the Gogol franchise starting with, Gogol: Nachalno (Gogol: The Beginning) which hit the Russian cinemas last year.

Konvert (The Envelope), another addition to Russia’s late foray into the horror genre, is an understated mini-gem. This was screened from November 30^th 2017 but – and this tells you a lot –had a run of only a week in most cinemas and seemed to get tucked away into late showings to make room for more popular fare like Dude Who Shrunk My Car? 3

The up and coming 37 year old Vladmir Markov held the clapper-board, the yarn was spun by Ilya Kulikov (who wrote the `Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion` TV series) and it introduces a 30 year old newcomer to the screen: the lean and dark Igor Lizengevitch.

At 78 minutes long `Konvert` is a compact tale with a handful of people for the cast and with all the action taking place in central Moscow over 24 hours. There are very few jump scares and almost no gory bits, (hence it being a 16 Certificate film). Indeed, this is a spooky and poetic drama with a European feel about it. Good use is made of sumptuous cruising shots of day and night Moscow from the wheel of a car and from above. The moody ambient score by Sergiei Stern then enhances this.

Igor is a young chauffeur for an architectural bureau. A letter arrives which seems to be sent to the wrong address. The secretary – an alluring young woman – gives him the task of ensuring that it ends up in the right hands. (You get the impression that Igor only agrees to this assignment to get in her favour and expect a love interest to develop, but it typifies the economy of this film that we never see her again).

In his efforts to deliver the mysterious envelope to the right apartment – through shadowy doorways and dusty alleyways –Igor enters the `twilight zone` where urban reality and phantoms commingle. Realising that the envelope is cursed he attempts to off load it onto other people but it keeps on ending up in his hands. Then a policewoman becomes his ally and joins him on his quest as they pursue a spectral girl, the victim of a car crash, and are lead to a cemetery….

Like Nevesta, and many a ghost story, this concerns the laying to rest of old injustices. The comparison between old Russia and the steel and glass modernity of Moscow is brought out well.

Less derivative than Pikova Dama, less melodramatic than Nevesti but not as much fun as Diggeri, Konvert is ideal fare for an icy mid-winter. Like Igor, you will have to do some searching to find it however!