Russian cinema – Page 2 – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

IT’S NOT A BOY! The film `Tvar` (`Stray`).

Another demon-child yarn with added sophistication, a pleasing autumnal ambience and a great role for Elena Lyadova.

All too many of the Russian made scary movies that I have promoted on here have had certain features in common. As much as they have prompted me to nod my head with a smile, they have sought to mimic Hollywood and to court those of college age.

Among the exceptions to this is TVAR (STRAY) a chiller delivered with some style. In fact, this enterprise is assured enough to risk being subtle as well as – not always a quality found in modern Russian cinema – original in parts.

From the `Queen of horror`.

TVAR opened in the cinemas on 28th November this year with a 16+ certificate. The picture houses sold it as a `detective mystery story`, which may be significant terms of marketing,, but this is really a supernatural thriller par excellence and one tailor made for the season in which it appeared.

The creator of the story is none other than Anna Starobinets who, on account of her short stories, has been dubbed Russia’s `Queen of horror`. Behind the cameras was Olga Gorodetska, who here is directing her first full length film (an hour and a half long). Ilya Ovsenev, who has worked on the forthcoming `Project Gemini`, was the cinematographer. Several production companies seem to have had some involvement in TVAR. The notable ones include Star Media – the purveyors of numerous effective television melodramas – and TV3, who seem to have their hand in every pie these days.

The main star on consists of Elena Lyadova, the 39-year-old Morshansk born actress,who many will be familiar with from the grim social-realist fable Leviathan (2014). She is joined by Vladimir Vdovichenkov who is 48 and also appeared in Leviathan. An other talent is Yevgeny Tsyganov who featured in Provodnik last year.

Family drama.

TVAR revolves around hearth and home and in the relations between man and wife and their children. In accordance with this, the areas touched on include grief, self-deception and indomitable mother love.

A couple in early middle -age, in recovery from the unspeakable loss of their first son, form the main protagonists. They find themselves visiting an orphange outside Moscow with the aim of finding a surrogate son to adopt.

Overseen by nuns, the forbidding institution is filled with cots, but none of their inhabitants inspire Polina, the bereaved mother (Lyadova), a former teacher. However, she then claps eyes on a wayward and neglected child who has secreted himself away in the basement of the building following the suicide of his father.

Enigma.

She is at once drawn to this odd-looking and angular child. When she asks to be granted the role of his new mother, she is met with some resistance from the nuns and also some scepticism from her more conventional but supportive husband (Vdovichenkov).

Polina persists and at length the couple take the boy to their home. The boy seems to respond to the loving attentions of his new mother but remains somewhat feral. He is given to scurrying beneath his bed when people appear,stuffing raw meat into his mouth, and crouching on top of furniture ready to pounce.( A bold performance from one Sevastyan Bugaev). On top of all that, there is mounting evidence that this boy is no ordinary maladjusted kid. He commits a serious assault on another child, for example. Nevertheless, the smitten mother comes to believe that he could even be a reincarnation of her lost son….

The Polina finds herself to be pregnant with a new child of her own….

New handling.

The drama skirts close to two cinema classics concerning demonic children: The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976) and even seems to reference them in one or two scenes.

That said, as much as the blood-and-thunder elements are central to the tale, the film downplays them a bit. It does so through the use of anti-climax and avoidance of clichés, putting only enough pepper into the soup to give it the necessary tang. So the supernatural situation may be old hat, but the handling of it blows the cobwebs away.

A film for its season.
[kinoafisha.info]

The adventurous photography of Ovsenev (we are treated to some unusual camera angles) and the overall direction (we are confounded with a false ending) make for memorable stylish stuff.

Then an overaching ambient score (from Alexander Slyootskiy and Karim Nasser) ramps up the Halloween atmosphere as the action moves between the creepy nun’s mansion, the couple’s swish Moscow apartment and then their dacha in the forest.

It is Lyadova’s sustained performance as a woman haunted in every sense of the word that adds gravitas to the whole tale.

TVAR has something of Don’t Look Now (1973) about it and also, from the same period, makes a nod towards Solaris (1972) at one key juncture. TVAR, though, with its small innovations and misty twilight setting, is all its own. It offers horror for grown ups.

TRAILER FOR `TVAR`

Featured image: youtube.com.

TEXT AND BE DAMNED: The Russian film TEKCT.

Anger is not something we expect from Russian cinema – but it is here at last.

TEKCT enjoyed a Decent run in the Moscow film theatre but I could only get to see it a week after its 24th October release at the Rodin theatre in Semyenovskaya.

With its train station-lie dowdiness and the Hammer and Sickle still there above the cash desk, and the harried staff, this place proved to be a fitting venue to catch this social realist fable. In fact I just nabbed the last available place in the twenty seat capacity projection room which had been set aside for the film.

TEKCT constitutes a drama thriller some two hours in length and with an 18+ certificate (hence featuring a lot of irritating bleeps over the bad language). Set very much in the Moscow of today, this picture represents an adaptation, by the author himself, of the novel By Dmitry Glukhovsky (of the Metro franchise) – which has yet to be translated into English.

General Partnership were the distributors, and the man in the high chair was one Kilma Shipenko who was behind the docudrama Salyut 7 (2017).
The soundtrack, which alternated between electronica and sombre classical owes to the prolific forty something composer Dmitry Noskov whose previous credits include the soundtrack to Attraction (2017).

Star vehicle.
Russia’s man-of-the-moment, the Yaroslavl born thirty-year old Alexander Petrov fills the shoes of the iconic role of the film’s anti-hero. (He seems to be cornering the market in troubled youths: whetther it is his role as the hotheaded insurgent in Attraction or his depiction of one Nikolai Gogol in the Gogol franchise (2017 -2018) ).
His co-stars include 29-year-old Ivan Yankovski, who cropped up in Queen of Spades: Dark Rite (2016) – as the Golden Boy hate figure – and the 27-year-old Kristina Asmus who has been setting pulses racing in the television medical comedy Intern since 2010.

The new Brat?
TEKCT was competing in the Russian box offices with Joker. It would be egregious of me to draw too many parallels between these two distinct products. I do, however, feel that they partake of the same zetgeist. Both highlight the plight of – and potential danger of – troubled young men on the margins of society.
Another comparison already being made is with the much vaunted earlier Russian movie Brat (Aleksei Balabanov, 1997).
An article by Anastasia Rogova in the (hard copy) newspaper Vechernaya Moskva (24th – 31st October issue) finds TEKCT wanting in relation to the other legendary film. However, the mere fact that the films have been bracketed together at all implies to me that TEKCT is a film that Russians will be discussing still for some time to come.

A Hero of Our Times?
Ilya Gorunov (Petrov), a graphic design student, attempts to blag some money off his mother so that he can hit the town with his girlfriend.When she refuses he takes the money anyway…
Next we see him a standard young man about town with his girlfriend in tow and in a trendy nightclub. His fun is interrupted when the politisia carry out a drugs raid the premises and seem to take interest in his woman. He protests, and then, in a scene which calls to mind Midnight Express, is himself arrested after a stash of cannabis seems to be found on his person. (We know the cops have planted this on him).
Seven years later, after having been imprisoned for drug trafficking, the hapless youth is released from his provincial jail and back into the real world.
Returning to Moscow, now a shambling figure in a parka and ill-fitting trousers, Ilya finds that his mother has passed away and that his friends have moved on.
He then tracks down his persecutor – Pyotr (Yankovski). In a fit of rancour he slaughters him by accident. He hides the corpse down a manhole and takes off with the victims cellphone….

Window on the other half.

Ivan Yankovski as the Golden Boy.
[newsmyseldon.com}

Here the Metro author’s gift for simple but ingenious plot ideas comes into play.
Ilya begins to experiment with the shady lawman’s phone. He begins to watch the many videos the man had downloaded showing his life of conspicuous consumption. He indulges in envious voyeurism at the lifestyle that he has been deprived of. He even pleasures himself over proxy sex with the man’s girlfriend (Asmus).
He becomes ever more embroiled in the man’s stolen identity living a sort of substitute existence. He answers text messages – explaining his absence by saying that he is in Columbia – and connects with the girlfriend.
This film shares the same concern with the loss of identity that social media can encourage in the much more stylish film Selfie (Khomeriki 2018).
Another resonance is with the Garros Evdomikov novel (as I reviewed earlier) Headcrusher (2003). This also evokes a lawman who wins female trophies and an oustider who gets to tangle with the games of the Big Boys. Ilya may be somewhat pathetic but the kind of modern Russian freeloaders that he is up against are far, far worse than he is.

Howl.
The film closes on a defiant note with a denouement that has shades of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) about it.
This could not be called a lovable film and I would not hurry to see it again just yet; however it is unflinching in its honesty and of importance in its themes – all qualities which Russian cinema too often lacks.
Petrov has turned in a fine, vigorous and physical performance in a film in which the camera is almost always on him.
Some gratitude is also due to Glukhovsky who, in his fortieth year, has Hollywood knocking on his door but has still retained his oppositional spunk.

Trailer to TEKCT (Russian).

Main image: bel.kp.ru

JUST DESSERTS: the film PAIN THRESHOLD (BOLEVOI POROG).

New actors get a chance to shine in this formulaic survival thriller.

The usual cinemas that I had expected to screen this sensational new Russian release did not do so so I ended up heading over to the Kosmos Kinoteatr on Prospekt Mira just two days after its premier. Even here though the showing had been relegated to a small upstairs venue – the sort that boasts bean bags for seats. An Art House flick sort of venue.

This was no Art House movie however, as the ten so or so punters and me who had turned up that night were about to discover…

New Blood.

Bolevoi Porog constitutes the latest addition to the crime/adventure thriller subgenre of which the impressive Otryv (reviewed earlier) also belongs.

Andrei Simonov has made his debut with this 100 minute long 16+ drama – by Look film in association with R. Media and distributed by SB Film -as both the scribbler of the script and the man holding the megaphone.

The acting talent that he has called on,whilst not quite household names, offer a synergy of old hands and rising stars. For instance, Arina Postkinova (Full Transformation, 2013) has already quite a prolific screen presence despite being just past her mid-twenties, whereas the 50-year-old Villen Babichek, a character actor who plays a villain, will be known to many for his role in Viking (2016).

Trial by fire.

`Everyone has their own pain threshold`runs the tagline for this movie (albeit which does not appear on the promotional poster). The story concerns the fate of three young Russians who are learn this fact.

The central players are two couples, rich daddy and mummies’ boys and girls one and all, including Lena (Postkinova), Tanya (Natalia Skomorokhova), Kirill (Roman Kurstyn) and Sergey (Kirill Komarov). They are just the sort of vacant and narcissistic tearaways destined, in such cautionary tales, to open the jack-in-a-box of fate….

We discover them enjoying an insouciant car chase with the politsia before their vehicle swerves and slams into a nightclub. The unimpressed manager, perhaps sensing them to be untouchable, advises them to clear well out of the city.

Next we find them, as carefree as ever, driving a van through the remote splendour of Gorny Altai (bordering Kazakhstan). They are ready for a spot of camping and Hiking. And white water rafting.

As their designated guide (Eugene Mundum) turns out to be a creepy old drunk, they make their own way to the water’s edge, waiving aside warnings about the hazards that lie ahead.

In one of the most effective and enlivening sequences in the film, they find the rapids to be more ferocious than they had counted on and they become separated and lose their dinghy.

Thus far we have a `nightmare holiday` anecdote. It is then, however, that they meet some other Russians…

This group of men present themselves as matey fellow travellers but in fact that they are escaped convicts. And they seem in no mood to be trifled with. Along with Babichek they include Evgeny Atarik (Dark World, 2010), Grigory Chaban (Vasha Neba, 2019), Oleg Fomin and Alexander Golubkov.

When one of the youths knocks out one of this party, in a bid to escape their effective enslavement, a chase between gilded youth and desperadoes ensues which becomes a no holds barred fight for survival.

Here is a film to make you grateful for the regimentation and anonymity of city life.

Lost resonances.

This is a sure-footed first film and one which showcases some emerging talent but it tells an oft told tale. It is the one about innocents discovering their inner strengths and inner demons in extremis. This, and the overall premise, makes Bolevoi Porog similar to the breakthrough movie Deliverance (1972) which has spawned many such imitators.

There exists one poignant scene where two of the youths, fleeing for their lives, descend a mountainside on which a village of Mongolic people are settled. The immediate response of the former is one of distrust and fear at the very appearance of these obvious metropolitans.

This uneasiness between the moneyed Russians and other ethnicities could have made for an interesting subtheme but is not really explored much further.

I find it difficult, in fact, to mine many wider themes from this film. Otryv seemed to suggest that Russia’s youth are being stymied by uncaring and incompetent elders. That would apply here too – except for the fact that, in this, the Young are architects of their own fates and there is a karmic sense to that which unfolds.

Sense of wilderness.

There have been recent television drama serials which have trodden similar waters. For instance Flint, broadcast by N.T.V – in effect a Russian reworking of Rambo: First Blood – also depicted a man reduced to an almost primitive state in fighting against greater odds.

The setting saves this film from banality, however. The cinematographer Andrei Losivof brings out the sun drenched Arcadia which provides the backdrop well and this is then enhanced by the incidental music of Dmitry Elemyanov – who this year also provided the score for Poteryanni Ostrov (Lost Island), which also features a stark landscape. The epic magnitude of his music shifts the film into horror territory.

The cast exhibit such vigorous performances that there is no need to show much gore, even when awful acts are committed. Then, for such a predictable scenario, the ending surprised me a little – and there was even some much-needed light relief in the final reel. Nevertheless, Otryv, with its fiendish and fresh premise remains the more memorable movie from this genre.

Trailer for BOLEVOI POROG (Russian language).

Featured image: courtesy- timeout.ru.

ABIGAIL AND THE IRON-MASKED OVERLORDS.

ABIGAIL: It’s a fairytale. No, wait. It’s steampunk…It’s a steampunk fairytale.

This August a blockbuster fantasy film, the creation of talent both inside and outside of Russia, came to town and gave birth to a new franchise. I hot-footed it to Cinemastar in Yugo Zapadnaya to be present at the birth. Such fantasy is a genre that I am not all that drawn to, but I could not miss out on such a major production.
This was released on August 22nd by Twentieth Century Fox C.I.S, but the progenitors are Kinodanz. After seven years in business this production company has already established itself as one able to call on big names. One Antonio Banderas appeared in their Beyond Reality (2016). In Abigail, likewise, the 51-year-old British actor Eddie Marson (Sherlock Holmes, 2009) plays a key part.

Beleaguered city.
Abigail constitutes a family oriented 6+ certificate science fantasy adventure served up with a steampunk aesthetic.
The film whisks us off to a world long ago and far away: Fensington. In this stylish and retro dominion, iron masked servants of a despotic state patrol the cobbled streets checking the identities of its citizens by scanning their eyes. These citizens have long been told that a terrible disease encircles the city and hence they need must remain isolated. The Special Department is charged with deporting those it deems as carriers of this disease.
This same world, however, is one in which magical powers can be called upon and where sprites flutter through the air outside the city. (The opening shots of the film introduce these, in a scene that reminded me of a certain Spice Girls video, gamboling through the forest glades).

Abigail’s quest.

Abigail Foster: a new heroine for the post-global age?
[kg-portal.ru]

The eponymous heroine, Abigail, (Tinatin Dalakishvilli) has lost her wise and vivacious father to the clutches of the Special Department. Her quest becomes one to find him and to discover who is behind the iron masks of the Special Department and what lies beyond the gates of Fensington.
This quest will cause her to doubt the official story and will introduce her to an alternate community of like-minded dissidents. This extraordinary league of gentlemen and lady magicians encourage Abigail to develope her own latent magical powers. Together they will all fly beyond the city boundaries aboard a magnificent airship….

International talents.
The brains behind this are not new to fantasy. The director and co-writer Aleksandr Boguslavsky has a background in Russian science fiction TV thrillers and his co-writer Dmitry Zhigalov has worked on the forthcoming science fiction film Project Gemini.
The 28-year-old Georgian model Dalakishivilli who first made her name five years back in an intriguing Georgian black comedy fantasy called Seazone, gets to play Abigail. She brings elegance and innocence to the role. Her father, seen in a series of flashbacks, is Marsan. Another luminary comes in the form of 30-year-old Tajik star Rinal Mukhamentov, who I recall as a pacific starman in Attraction (2016). Here he has a mute role.
Many of the outdoor shots were filmed on location in the old town part of Tallin, Estonia’s picture postcard capital.

Enchantment.

Visual sumptuousness forms a large part of the charm of Abigail. The location scenes of a spire-crossed winterscape and the cosy brownish interiors, the Edwardian-cum-twenties technology, the glittering CGI effects and the glamorous cast, all are designed to enchant.
The ambience is notched up by a quasi-classical soundtrack courtesy of the Muscovite Ryan Otter who composed for the Gogol triptych (2017, 2018). Here he employs much in the way of bass horns to convey both menace and majesty.

Subtext.
The underlying message seems to be that age-old one about how you have to ignore the crusty old powers-that-be and find your individual inner strength and so on. Nothing new here then.
The positive depiction of a father -daughter relationship is refreshing however. Marsan’s father oozes twinkly parental love. (In fact, I now realise that he must have been saying his lines in English and that these were then dubbed into Russian. This was not apparent when I watched the film!)
Otherwise this could be taken to be a veiled allegory about the current political situation in Russia where peaceful protestors can be hauled away by masked policemen and the population is forever being warned of contamination by outside sources.

Dystopia in fairyland.
The film feels like a mechanism constructed out of previous films: a bit of Harry Potter here, a bit of Equilibrium there and then a bit of The Golden Compass. However, its organising principle is its steampunk ethos which it wears heavily on its sleeve. We see plenty of mechanical contraptions and the airships have been lifted straight from the novels of Michael Moorcock. This plausible alternate world scenario is then stretched further by us being asked to believe in sprites and conjuring, which may challenge older viewers as much as it thrills younger ones.
On the one hand the shimmering magic rays and so on , realised by CGI effects, grate a bit being such a hackneyed trope but on the other, some of the fighting scenes seem a little too strong for a younger audience (Note to producers: replacing guns with swords does not make a scene any less violent!)
Then, as pretty as the locations shots are, they do make us feel a little enclosed until you feel almost as glad as the protagonists do when they commandeer the airship to take them out of there!

Big designs.
Abigail should play well to its target audience: tweenies in need of an ersatz Harry Potter and older geeks who appreciate a dash of steampunk. (Indeed, much of the film’s material was pre-released at the Moscow Comic convention long before the actual first showing).
Whether this ambitious commercial franchise can break into the coveted Western market remains to be seen though. Its very existence, nevertheless, does show the emerging strength of the Russian film industry.

Trailer for `Abigail` – dubbed into English.

Featured image from Youtube.com

PLAYBOY OF THE EASTERN WORLD: Are the glitzy Moscow highlife DYXLESS films still relevant?

A black drone in the night sky, outside the lit window of a Moscow office block. Shady deals are underway in the interior. A heavy in the company spots the spy craft, pulls out a pistol and fires at it, blowing holes in the window. The drone drops. The credits begin….

Such is the opening to Dyxless 2 . `Wake up`, it seemed to say. `And welcome to 2015! `

Many a Russian film is, if not a goofy slapstick type comedy set in a sunny never-never land , then yet another brawny heroic retread of the `Great Patriotic War`. Within all that there exists ample room for pictures concerned with the here-and-now. Half a decade back, the Dyxless films seemed to provide just that.

The title `Dyxless` – sometimes transliterated into `Duhless` – means `Soulless` (the Russian word `Doosha` with the English suffix `less` grafted onto it). The film represents an adaptation of a novel by Sergey Minaev called `Soulless: the Tale of an Unreal Man` which caused a stir in 2006. The wine trader and broadcaster, now in his mid-forties, had exposed the `Botox. Bentley. Sushi` milieu of the new aspirational Russians. Critics even bracketed him with Bret Easton Ellis, of American Psycho fame.

Lifting the lid on a decadent glamour.

Six years later the screen version, billed as `A film about what really matters in life`, opened the Moscow International Film Festival. Kinoslovo films produced it and the now fifty year old Roman Prygunov (son of the actor Lev Prygunov) directed. The rising matinée idol, the 27 year old Danila Kozlovsky, played the story’s anti-hero, Max. (Koslovsky is known to some Western viewers for his role in The Vampire Academy).

Max Andreev is a 29-year-old orphan who has risen to be a top executive manager of a French/Russian credit company. He is, as he puts it `master of reality` and can get everything money can buy. His life, however, is… `soulless`. That is until he meets Julia (Mariya Andreeva). Julia belongs to an alternative world of anti-capitalist theatrics. For example, her crew set off a paint bomb in a fancy restaurant to protest the meat trade. A love affair results, which causes Max to reconsider his priorities. Can he renounce his old ways?

This consumerist -romp-with-a-conscience provoked enough interest to justify the making of a sequel, released in March of 2015.

Downshifter.

Dyxless 2 begins in Bali where we find Max now living as a surfing hipster, having said farewell to the life of high finance. Soon, however, his old associates track him down and use heavy-handed tactics to lure him back to Moscow. `There are new waves there`, they tell him of the Moscow that has moved on in his absence.

Installed in the Carlton-Ritz on Tverskaya Street, he is introduced to a fellow Bright Young Thing (played by the Serbian actor Milos Bikovic) who insists on Max having a make-over and introduces him to venture capitalism. Max ix back in the soulless world, but he meets Julia again, who is now married and has sold out. He also uncovers a network of corruption and in so doing discovers a new sense of purpose as a champion of ethical business. Can he keep his integrity?

Whilst the first film is an outrageous drama with a love interest, the second one is more of an espionage thriller with a veiled sociopolitical message. Both contain the same hints of dry humour about them, however.

In visual terms they both showcase well photographed scenes of the Russian capital, such as the River Moskva, or the Moscow State University seen from above. This is as befits a director with a background in advertising and rock videos. As for Koslovsky, the critics appreciated his performance enough to award him the Golden Eagle for the best film actor of 2012 for the first one. Dyxless imprinted his image on the national psyche and he has been a much sought after screen lead ever since. (Neither film, by the way, has been made available dubbed into English, but the first one can be found online with English subtitles).

Some have compared the pictures to Wall Street. They share some of the ambivalence about runaway consumerism which that film had, but lack the political punch that the film also delivered in 1987. Dyxless also calls to mind Room at the Top (1958), the classic British morality tale about the pursuit of success. However, the director owes the most to French cinema (to see just how much so, read Russian Film Symposium notes of 2013).Writing in 2013 Elena Murkhortova uncovers the way in which Dyxless `samples` some sequences from the 2007 French film 99 Francs. Of equal interest is her revelation that the character of Max owes much to Eugene Onegin, Pushkin’s immortal anti-hero.

On the domestic end, the film Generation P (2011) explores not so different themes, but in a much more edgy, oppositional manner. Likewise, the notorious Leviathan (2014) takes far more risks by zooming in on the opposite end of the social spectrum.

The Metro newspaper said at the time that there might be a further sequel on the way (after all Dyxless 2 has been the most popular Russian film of this year). Perhaps it would even become a franchise, a bit like the Bond series?

No more from Max.

This was not to be. What we got instead, three years later, was Selfie. Nikolai Khomeriki was the kingpin this time. This 44-year-old talent’s previous motion picture had been Ledokol (Icebreaker) from 2016, a fact-based gritty adventure concerning the fate of a nuclear icebreaker. Selfie too was a more Russian affair: a Moscow film noir set in icy back streets. The protagonist too, whilst affluent, was middle-aged and washed out (depicted well by Konstantin Khabensky). This film was not, nor intended to be, a continuation of the Dyxless cycle, despite the involvement of Minaev, (who wrote the screenplay this time).

You see the Dyxless films now look like period pieces. In a nation beset by sanctions and a stalling economy, where the urban young are becoming indignant about corruption and rigged elections, the glossy magazine world that those films both indulged and satirised already appears less and less relevant. Even so, before we leave the twenty Teens behind, it is worth recalling that these films seemed almost alone in their brief day for at least trying to say something about their own times.

Trailer for Dyxless.

Trailer for Dyxless 2 (English subtitles).

Main image courtesy of DOMKINO TV.

`LOST ISLAND` (`POTERRYANIY OSTROV`): YOU CAN CHECK IN, BUT YOU CAN’T CHECK OUT.

There is something not quite right about the small group of Russians living like pagans in an island in the Sakhalin province, in this intriguing thriller.

Every so often a fresh new film arrives out of nowhere that seems unique and thought-provoking. Such a film for this year comes courtesy of C.B film/Silyakoffilm and is called Poteryanniy Ostrov – Lost Island.

First screened at Stalker – the International Human Rights film festival last December, this motion picture received scant pre-publicity. I came across it whilst browsing what was on offer at the Moscow cinemas. This one, at least, was not a vacuous comedy nor about the Second World War and then the romantic poster and the promise of a `mystical thriller` enticed me further. I caught the last showing at the enormous October cinema in Novy Arbat just a few days after its first release on April 4th.

A 90 minute 16+ age limit drama/thriller, Lost Island defies categorisation. This owes to the fact that the film’s origins lie in the theatre: Natalya Moshina reworked her own stage play, then called Rikotu Island and staged twelve years back, for this screen adaptation.

Denis Silyakov whose previous credit was Dom Oknami v Pole – House Facing the Field (2017) directed the film on location on the island of Kunashir, the rugged southernmost island of the Sakhalin archipelago.

Daniil Maslennikov (Kosatka, 2014) plays Igor Voevodin, an economics analyst who produces copy for a magazine in downtown Moscow. His boss – Dmitry Astrakhan (Milliard, 2019) responds to a spot of workplace tension by proposing that the young man take the trip of a lifetime , all paid for by the company. The provisos are that it is to be a journalistic fact-finding mission and also that the destination must be chosen at random from an electronic map.
It is the fictional island of Rikotu, a far Eastern Kuril island in the province of Sakhalin in the Pacific ocean, that Igor’s finger alights.

Following a turbulent crossing on a private vessel, he arrives at his new abode to find that it is home to just twelve inhabitants who form an alternative community. Their leader is an algae specialist and an alluring young woman called Anya. ((Natalia Frey who also starred in The House Facing the Field). Dwelling in basic wooden huts and subsisting on seafood from the surrounding waters, the people live a spartan life. They also seem to worship a shrimp as their godhead.

`You’re not from these parts are you?`
[Teleproramma.po]

Igor, in his capacity as a journalist begins to question the elders of the community such as aunt Sasha Stepanova (played by Tatiana Dogileva, who has some 108 screen and TV appearances on her C.V). He soon hits a wall, however.
The islanders seem not to believe in the existence of Igor’s home city and know little about Russia too. As to how they ended up on Rikotu island, they are just as hazy.

Then when Igor stumbles on the drowned corpse of an islander who had tried to escape the question becomes: will he himself be able to leave and tell the rest of Russia what he has learnt?

The premise – where a metropolitan new world meets a recalcitrant old world – calls to mind the cult British horror movie The Wicker Man (1973). Silyakov, however, handles this material with more finesse. There are no clear villains here and the stress is more on the enigma rather than any Grand Guignol moments that the situation could throw up.

This is a twisty fable worthy of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and it is executed with style and good character acting that avoids teetering into comedy.
Maslennikov is well cast as the innocent all-Moscow boy whereas Frey oozes femme fatale sexuality. Georgy Nazarenko (Monax ii Bes, 2016) is convincing as a grizzled old timer and real natives of Kunashir make up the cast too. Marina Cherkunova, lead singer with the band Total, as Lyusha the malcontent, adds a dash of New Age spice to it all.

Ekaterina Kobsor’s cinematography, bringing out he crystalline rocks and spruce of this desolate environment, and Dmitri Emelyanov’s quasi-classical score help to build up the ambience.

What crowns the whole drama though is the involvement of Total, an underrated Russian alternative rock/trip hop band. Their closing song `Skontachimsiya` (or A.K.A `Let’s Get Fucked in the Sky`) seals the sense of erotic entrapment of the film.

So is this just a strange thriller? One could view Lost Island as a state-of-the-nation statement. A comparison might be made with J.B.Priestley’snovel Benighted (1927) which was later made into a film called The Old Dark House (1932). In this a group of motorists trapped in an old mansion with its crotchety residents serves as a comment on Britain between the wars.

A scene from the play `Rikotu Island`.
[chekhov-teatr.ru]

One person who seems to agree with this assessment is Pavel Ruminov writing in the Theatre Times (25th January 2018). Speaking of the original stage play, he characterises it as showing us a Russia`swept into a whirlpool of mysticism and irrationality`.

That said, what remains with you long after the credits have rolled and the cinema lights turned on, is the baleful atmosphere of this distinctive film.

Trailer for the film.

Total song from `Lost Island`

Featured image Copyright: C.B film.

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.