280. Russian maestro Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky’s 24th feature film “Sin“ (Il Peccato) (2019), in Italian: A fascinating study on Michelangelo’s thoughts and actions while leading a near hermitic life and creating monumental works of art

“Arrogance is sin” 

 “I wanted to find God; I only found Man”   

 “Money always rubs elbows with infamy”

              --key lines spoken in Sin--co-scripted by Andrei Konchalovsky and Elena Kisaleva

Andrei Konchalovsky’s Sin is a film more on the thoughts of the amazingly gifted painter, sculptor and writer Michelangelo (1465-1564) and less on his famous works and how he created those masterpieces of art. The film presents a frenetic individual at the time of his life when he was sculpting night and day, more than he was painting or writing, often in imaginary conversation with the dead poet Dante Alighieri whose works he knew by rote, even while walking alone. The more we delve into Konchalovsky’s film Sin, one appreciates the dogged research that went into the making of the film to connect the dots between Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the historical battles between two rich Roman families--the Della Povere and the Medicis--to install Popes, and the effect  of both Dante’s works and the two Roman families that controlled and influenced the creative outputs of Michelangelo, which included the final design of the existing St Peter’s Cathedral in Vatican City, apart from fresco paintings and sculptures admired to date. At a different level, the film is a perfect  example of  the importance of original co-scriptwriters—in this case, the gifted team of Konchalovsky and Elena Kiseleva-- in creating a feature film, than other facets, as is often perceived in good cinema. 

Alberto Testone, a dentist in real life, who resembles 
Michelangelo, plays the lead part in the film

It is therefore important to know some basic details about Konchalovsky and Kiseleva in order to appreciate Sin, the film, in its totality. 

Andrei Konchalovsky has been overlooked by many film critics and cinephiles for his outstanding contribution to the medium over several decades. As a Russian, the western world ignored him, possibly because his films were either not easily accessible nor well assessed by prominent western film critics. Most Tarkovsky fans do not realize that three of Tarkovsky’s early films (Andrei Rublev, Ivan’s Childhood, and The Steamroller and the Violin) were co-scripted by Konchalovsky  (who incidentally was Tarkovsky’s classmate at film school).   While Konchalovsky made a mark collaborating first with Tarkovsky, he later improved  his credibility of his own  worth by moving from scriptwriting to direction (five films he directed: Asya; The First Teacher; A Nest of the Gentry; Siberiade; and a superb film version of Uncle Vanya) in Russia during his pre-Hollywood phase, which  saw these films winning a Golden Lion award at Venice film festival (for Asya),  a Silver Lion for Best Actress at Venice (for The First Teacher), and the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes festival  (for Siberiade). 

When he left Russia in 1980 to make films in Hollywood, one of his films (Runaway Train) got nominated for an Oscar and the Golden Palm at the Cannes film festival; another (Duet for One) got nominated for a Golden Globe;  another (Maria’s Lovers) got nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival; another (Homer and Eddie) won the Golden Seashell  for the best film at the San Sebastian Film Festival  in Spain, while yet another of his films from his Hollywood period (Shy People) won the Best  Actress award for Barbara Hershey at Cannes.  These accolades strung together are more impressive global honors than the works of most other directors working in Hollywood and would make any one of them envious.   

After he returned to Russia, disillusioned with the Hollywood studio system disagreeing with his artistic non-commercial concepts and eventually ending up being fired midway while trying to make Tango and Cash the way he conceived it, Konchalovsky struck gold by teaming up with co-scriptwriter Elena Kiseleva. His four films with her have won even better accolades than ever before in his career—The Postman’s White Nights (2014, Silver Lion For Best Director at Venice film festival); Paradise (2016, Silver Lion For Best Director at Venice film festival 2017, once again; Best Actor (Actress) award at the Munich film Festival,2017); Sin (2019, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design and Best Costume Design at the Nika awards, 2020); and Dear Comrades (2020, Special Jury Prize at the Venice film festival, Best Director at the Chicago international film festival, Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Sound  awards at the Nika awards). The magic weaved by the duo is comparable to the similar director-scriptwriter magic woven by Kieslowski and Piesiewicz in Poland, by Loach and Laverty, by Lean and Bolt, and by Losey and Pinter in UK-- all fine examples of directors peaking at the evening of their careers by teaming up with the right co-scriptwriter. The more you know of Konchalovsky's films you realize the director is a thinker and immensely well read compared to his peers globally and can arguably be only compared to Orson Welles or Raul Ruiz, not even Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman.

A Joycean epiphany perceived by Michelangelo woken up from slumber
at dawn in Florence. His statue of David is erected in the streets 
but behind it is a man who has been hanged.
Konchalovsky's vision of Michelangelo's quatrain
"..in this age of crime and shame/not to live, not to feel-an enviable destiny/
it is gratifying to sleep/ it is more gratifying to be stone"

Konchalovsky’s initial interest in making a film about the Italian artistic genius Michelangelo has an amazing connection with Andrei Rublev, which he co-scripted with Tarkovsky. This writer stumbled upon journalist/critic Valery Kichin’s revealing interview in Russian with Konchalovsky in 2018, in which Konchalovsky recalls noticing visitors to an Italian cathedral kissing a laminated A4-size Rublev’s painting called Trinity, ignoring the luxurious Italian frescoes in the vicinity. That incident sparked off the idea in Konchalovsky's mind of making a film on Michelangelo since his script on Rublev had struck gold nearly half a century earlier. 

The well-read Konchalovsky recalled that Michelangelo in a response to a historian and aristocrat Giovanni Strozzi (who had written a quatrain admiring Michelangelo’s sculpture Night with the words “…she was sculpted from stone by an angel/if he sleeps then he is full of life/just wake up/ he will talk to you”  to which Michelangelo had replied to Strozzi with a witty quatrain “Be quiet please, don’t you dare wake me/oh, in this age of crime and shame/not to live, not to feel-an enviable destiny/it is gratifying to sleep/ it is more gratifying to be stone.”   

Konchalovsky connects that response of Michelangelo with why he decided to make Sin. He reveals to Kichin: “’In a shameful age I want to be stone.’ What did he mean by that about his life? ..If this statement is taken as an analysis of his life, an artist and a person?  More precisely a person…An artist sculpts something from stone, writes notes, paints,..all this is in external form something secondary. There is a great play on Salieri’s envy of a genius (Mozart) but not about how the genius writes music. Michelangelo lives in the center of European culture, in Florence, and it so happens that he is brilliantly gifted. Hence, the theme and the conflict of my movie Sin. Michelangelo was a fan of Dante. Michelangelo in his sculptures expressed the idea of martyrdom, created images that were equal in expression to the images of Dante ” (Ref: https://rg.ru/2018/10/24/andrej-konchalovskij-moj-film-eto-moe-videnie-zhizni-mikelandzhelo.html) 

In the same interview with Kichin, Konchalovsky reveals that even Leonardo da Vinci regarded Michelangelo as an expert on Dante’s writings and would refer him as such to Leonardo’s students.  “Dante wrote in the genre of “visione”—using religious phantasmogoric visions” says Konchalovsky, who researched Michelangelo’s life for some 10 years before Sin was made. 

The repentant Michelangelo in conversation with Dante (in red),
after he finds the newly married couple,
 whose marriage he had financially supported
inexplicably killed and...

... the conversation with Dante continues, edited and transported 
from the room to the mountains, with their positions unchanged. 
"I know my creations are beautiful. People admire
 them but nobody prays in front of them"

Thus, the differences between Carol Reed’s film The Agony and The Ecstasy (based on Irving Stone’s novel of the same name) made in 1965 and Michelangelo’s Sin are considerable. The former is an adaptation of a novel, while the latter is based on the director’s personal  research. Konchalovsky’s film emphasizes the connections with Dante, which is not discussed by Reed and Stone.  Reed’s film delves more on the Sistine Chapel paintings, while Konchalovsky’s film begins with the near completion of the Sistine Chapel paintings and is devoted more to Michelangelo working on later sculptures of Michelangelo, with the statue of David already erected on a street, in a dream sequence. And unlike Reed’s film where Contessina de Medici  (played by Diane Cilento) is a major female personality close to Michelangelo, Konchalovsky’s  film presents a hermit-like Michelangelo whose interest in women is clinical, to use visible aspects of their bodies as mere sources of inspiration for his sculptures and not sexual attraction. 

Konchalovsky’s and Kiseleva’s original screenplay projects Michelangelo’s growing popularity with the rich and the poor alike as a maestro while he was still alive which led him to an artistic hubris, understandably with three Popes in succession asking Michelangelo to work for them when they became Popes: Pope Julius II (belonging to the Della Rovere family) and Popes Clemens VII and Paul III (belonging to the Medici family). Michelangelo had only contempt for his contemporary artist Raphael’s abilities (shown in Sin) unlike Raphael, who in admiration of Michelangelo, drew the portrait of Michelangelo as Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher in one of his paintings for the Pope’s apartments. That pride of Michelangelo is the “arrogance” stated in one of the spoken lines in Sin.  He did not allow even allow his assistants to work on his paintings and sculptures.  

Michelangelo negotiates with one of the successive Popes
on assignments, payments and deadlines

In one of the memorable sequences in Sin, another painter is asked by the Pope to undertake a sculpture and design assignment that Michelangelo was initially asked to do and discusses the project with Michelangelo to gain some insights in a pub. In a nod to Dante’s Inferno in The Divine Comedy, while the Michelangelo and the other painter discuss the project, Michelangelo sees a reptile/snake in a pile of clothes in a corner. He goes to the pile to investigate and finds no snake. He returns to the table and tears up the design of the other painter. That’s another sin (envy) in the proximity of the devil (read, snake).  Greed, pride and anger overtake Michelangelo, becoming richer by the day but living like hermit in tattered clothes on salted cod fish and forcing his apprentices to eat likewise. He began to imagine he was being poisoned when that was not true. An inexplicable murder of a bridal couple (married with the finances that Michelangelo provided)  with their blood dripping on his table wakes up Michelangelo from slumber to acknowledge his sins of greed, pride and anger with Michelangelo  asking forgiveness from God and seeking help from the long dead Dante Alighieri. 

The Konchalovsky-Kiseleva duo extends the realistically unreal “purgatory” interview in their earlier award-winning work Paradise to insert several Joyce-like epiphanies of Michelangelo in the course of the film, with a final meeting with the dead Dante, who when asked for help, replies with single word “Listen” in response.

The interview with Kichin provides more fascinating insights. Konchalovsky began to see the finished collaborative script of Sin as an extension Andrei Rublev, there with a bell, here with a large chunk of marble. The 10-ton marble block in the film was transported with the help of 50 odd descendants of Carrara workers who speak the local dialect (of Michelangelo’s time) who extract marble to this day and was transported with oxen brought from different parts of Italy—not unlike Herzog making his Fitzcarraldo, transporting a steamship over hills of Peru.  The actor Alberto Testone, chosen to play Michelangelo, is a dentist in real life and resembles Michelangelo (unlike Charlton Heston in Reed’s film) and gives a very impressive performance. But Konchalovsky has a knack to make his actors give outstanding performances (Barbara Hershey in Shy People, Julie Andrews in Duet for One, Jon Voight in Runaway Train, and, last but not least, his own wife Yulia Vysotskaya in Paradise and Dear Comrades). 

Transporting the 10-ton marble block from Carrera mountains to
the city reminiscent of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo 

One wonders if Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is divided into three sections Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, fits well with a possible completed Konchalovsky trilogy made up with  Sin and Paradise as being possible components with a possible third film being conceptualized. That said, Konchalovsky is one of the best filmmakers actively making award winning films over several decades and continues to work with some of the original team that worked with Tarkovsky such as Eduard Artemyev who composed and arranged music for most films of directors Tarkovsky, Konchalovsky and Konchalovsky’s half-brother Nikita Mikhalkov. The film is a treat for students of cinema, of the Bible, of the arts and of  literature.

A silent cameo of Mrs Konchalovsky (actress Yulia Vyotskaya)
in Sin

P.S.  A first cut of  Sin was personally presented by President Putin of Russia to Pope Francis at the suggestion of Konchalovsky. It won Nika awards for cinematography, production design, and costume design. Several of Konchalovsky’s earlier films Runaway Train (1985), Shy People (1987), House of Fools (2002), The Postman’s White Nights (2014), and Paradise (2016) have been reviewed on this blog earlier (Please click on their names in this post-script to access those reviews)

 

252. Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s debut feature film “Chetyre” (4) (2004), based on a script by post-modern author/dramatist Vladimir Sorokin: A perplexing, absurdist, and depressing study of contemporary, post-glasnost Russia

“Exhausted by hunger, he ate in secret. He thought he was stealing food; but that was better than stealing from strangers”  

-- Narrator of a TV program on dogs, viewed by Oleg in the film 4

The film 4 was made in 2004 and won 11 major film awards across Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Khrzhanovskiy’s  debut film 4 is no ordinary feature film. Four stray dogs on a Moscow street at night open the film. Four persons (3 customers and a bartender) accidentally meet at a bar late night. The three drinkers (Marina, a female prostitute; Vladimir, a male piano tuner/musician; and Oleg, a male wholesale-meat supplier) construct their alternate fictional professions as they consume alcohol and attempt connecting with each other. 

Bar scene: (left to right) Vladimir, Marina and Oleg

As the film progresses, we realize Marina is one of 4 sisters. Marina (played by actress Marina Vovchenko) meets up with two of her other sisters (possibly played by her real life sisters, if we go by their surnames and physical similarity) in her village. The fourth sister has just passed away. Marina travels with three strangers in a train compartment (they too add up to four). Asked by one of her co-passengers about where she is heading, she responds “To shoot a grenade launcher—my psychiatrist’s advice to clear the head. It helps against suicide.” More allegories, more symbols, more absurd connections. The person who asked her the question returns much later in the film as a thief stealing a watch from a car-accident site.

At the early bar sequence, the conversation among the three drinkers are about dogs and humans, after Marina curses a man who has run over a dog at night. “A dog’s life is shit,” says one. “Man’s life is shit” is the terse response. “A dog’s life is comfortable, actually” is a follow-up comment from Oleg, the wholesale-meat seller. “Hit a dog on the road and bad luck follows you; hit a man and good luck follows,’’ adds Oleg. “Dogs are closer to God,” says Vladimir, implying thereby that humans are comparatively less close to God.

"Dogs are closer to God"
Four stray dogs on a Moscow street open the film

Dogs are everywhere, following all the characters--at the meat factory, at the village to eat up the dolls (made up of chewed bread!), following the thief who robs a watch off the hand of Oleg, who has just minutes ago crashed his car in an effort to save a stray dog crossing the road (Oleg, at the bar scene earlierin the film, had professed his love for dogs, constituting an Aristotelian structural balance to end the meandering script of 4).

There is a Muslim, who sells meat of bizarre round piglets (genetically modified?) and kicks a dog (both animals that devout Muslims avoid dealing with) and is promptly reprimanded for his action by the non-Muslim Oleg, who loves dogs and watches dog programs on TV at home, surrounded by spic and span dog statues and stuffed dogs,.

Four planes take off with prisoners (including Valdimir) forcibly trained to be soldiers to fight at some unknown frontier. What’s this strange fascination with the number 4? In one of the comments made at the bar, Vladimir ironically states that 4 legs lend stability to a table.

Old women of the village mourn at the fresh grave
of Marina's sister

Marina’s village reminds one of the derelict world of Tarkovsky's film Stalker. The population of the village is strange. It is surrounded by barbed wires and caution notices warning trespassers of high-tension electrical cables. But Marina knows how to navigate those barriers. The village seems to have survived in a time warp, complete with imposing but closed Russian orthodox churches and where the poor aged inhabitants sing hymns at burials and sell weird dolls to survive. There is just one male in the village, otherwise populated by females. Most of the women are toothless and old. Even in their advanced age, they talk of sex and continue to be proud of their breasts, when inebriate with vodka. The only two young female inhabitants of the village are Marina’s siblings and one of them has just died and had been adept at making the dolls.  En route to her village, Marina passes a truck/shop storing the genetically modified round piglets. (Everything in the film script is connected, if you are observant!) The odd male in the all-female village commits suicide after perfecting the faces of the last four dolls, using up all his savings. 

There is a strange connect between the muddy exteriors of Marina’s village and the mysterious mud that gathers on Moscow streets as though there has been a recent flood that require truck-based bulldozers to clear the detritus.

The sole male inhabitant of the village
carry four unfinished dolls (note the mud)

Thus the film 4 presents you with animals who behave like humans and human beings who behave like animals. Some of the animals are alive, others are now dead carcasses. And some of the carcasses are possibly the result of banned/mad/state-supported scientific experiments to be sold as prized meat to high-end restaurants that exist but do not seem to have much patronage/clientele.

Just a few minutes into the film and any intelligent viewer will know that the tale is a political allegory of Russia today. 

As this writer reviews the film 4 during the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, the shrill video messages of Wuhan residents pleading for global help are recalled. In 4, stray dogs are suddenly disturbed by sudden arrival of earth-moving equipment to redo a Moscow street at night that did not seem to require major repairs or reconstruction. The dogs and humans in Russia (and now in Wuhan, China) are at the mercy of forces that are incomprehensible to the respective denizens. And yet life trudges on, in an absurdist reality that reminds you of Ionesco's plays.

Vladimir, who was observing fishes, turtles and strange water eels in glass water-tanks, in the film 4 is picked up by the police off the street and later interned in a prison camp and forcibly re-trained to be a soldier to be packed off like hundreds of others to fight an unknown national enemy in 4 huge aircrafts.

The well-to-do Oleg has a father Misha who was/is a scientist constantly worried about dangerous microbes and is a fanatic for health safety to the extent of washing his garbage cans each day. Misha loves his dead wife and wants to visit his wife’s grave with his son Oleg. Misha is a scientist who firmly believes in the power of hell. This is where Vladimir Sorokin’s contribution surfaces as the novelist/playwright/scriptwriter is apparently a devout Christian, getting baptized at 25 and refusing to join the Komsomol, the youth communist cadre. Sorokin subsequently won the People’s Booker prize and other international prizes with his works translated from Russian into more than 20 languages. Sorokin’s tongue-in-cheek aside in 4 that perhaps only die-hard chess enthusiasts will spot includes the names of famous Russian chess players Bronstein and Lukin, dropped nonchalantly by Vladmir at the bar scene as the names of famous genetic engineering scientists in the tale he fabricates.

There are visuals of streets getting cleaned in 4 by water-spraying trucks and bulldozers clearing mud. At the end of the film, you do see a cleaned-up road. But ironically who is using this clean facility? A dirty thief and a stray dog. No detail in this film is non-allegorical. When the village women eat and relish the meat of a dead pig, there is food for thought. When the pig’s head is thrown into a pig sty for other pigs to hog, there is food for thought. When dolls made of chewed bread are eaten by stray dogs, there is food for thought.

These are just some fascinating elements of the film (script by Vladimir Sorokin). Does the film belong to the director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy (his debut feature film) or to Sorokin or to both? The film is audacious and critical of modern Russia, reminding one at times of Joseph Heller's book Catch 22, subsequently made into a feature film by director Mike Nichols. Somewhere, the mad script of 4 comes together. It reminds one of another nihilistic recent debut film--this time from China—Bo Hu's An Elephant Sitting Still (2018). Only Bo Hu committed suicide soon after making his film, while Khrzhanovskiy has finally made his second film. The film 4 could well have had an alternate fitting title “4 dogs not sitting still," on the lines of Bo Hu’s film.

P.S.  Bo Hu’s debut film An Elephant Sitting Still (2018), a film critical of modern China was reviewed earlier on this blog. (Click on the name of the Chinese film in this post-script to access the review.). The film 4 won awards at the Antalya Golden Orange film festival in Turkey (Best Director), the Athens international film festival in Greece (City of Athens award), the Buenos Aires international film festival of independent cinema in Argentina (Best Director), the Golden Apricot Yerevan international film festival in Armenia (Jury Special Prize), Rotterdam international film festival in the Netherlands (Golden Cactus and Tiger awards), Seattle international film festival in USA (New Directors Showcase award), Sochi Open Russian film festival in Russia (Jury Special Prize), Titanic international film festival in Budapest, Hungary (Breaking Waves award), Transilvania international film festival in Romania (Transilvania trophy and Best Cinematography) and Valdiva international film festival in Chile (Best Soundtrack). Some 15 years later, the film’s director Khrzhanovskiy has made his second ambitious and controversial feature film DAU in 2019. The DAU film project also has writer Sorokin of 4 to prop up Khrzhanovskiy.

247. Russian director Kantemir Balagov’s second feature film “Dylda” (Beanpole) (2019): A Russian Nobel Prize winning work of literature inspires a complex film on the varied tribulations of an unmarried woman

Three very interesting and complex films on women with screenplays written by the film’s own directors are those made by male directors. One of those three would be Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole.  Balagov has admitted that his main source of inspiration was Nobel Prize for Literature winner Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexeivich’s 1983 book War doesn’t have a woman’s face. The other two films of similar artistic strengths and flavour about unmarried women are the American films: Joseph L. Manckiewicz’ The Barefoot Contessa (1954) with Ava Gardner (in arguably her best role) and Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978) with Jill Clayburgh (in one of her best roles). Balagov, unlike the two US director-cum-screenplay writers, co-scripted his film with another male scriptwriter, Aleksandr Terekhov. Both Balagov and Mazursky present a quixotic emancipation for their lead characters, while in Manckiewicz’ case the liberation, unfortunately, leads to tragedy.

Iya (Victoria Miroshnichenko) the Beanpole  (Note the use of white in this shot)

Iya, the Beanpole, in another contrasting shot. (Note the use of green
and the deliberate camera angle to capture it)

Balagov’s film Beanpole is not a war film though it is indeed a tale of soldiers just as Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) is not a typical war film but rather a film on the “war” within the soldiers’ minds in a war setting. Likewise, Beanpole is an exquisite film on the psychological, social and medical “wars” female soldiers fight, on their return from the frontline for their aspirations for a emotionally fulfilled life.  Balagov is a self-confessed admirer of Russian film maestro Alexander Sokurov and the deft use of the camera, lighting, and visual composition in Beanpole will recall the typical Sokurov touches. (The use of colour and lighting in Beanpole is far superior and intelligently chosen compared to the Oscar nominees of 2020.)

Iya and Masha and the subtle use of contrasting colours in their garments

Victoria Miroshnichenko plays the gangly, former Russian World War II soldier Iya, euphemistically called “Beanpole” because of her lanky height and simplicity. More importantly most characters in the film are aware that Iya is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).   As the film progresses, the viewer will note that “Beanpole” in the film is quite the opposite of the intelligent PTSD afflicted Will (Ben Foster) in the interesting US film Leave No Trace (2018). The PTSD afflicted Iya, who dotes on her military colleague and friend Maya’s toddler son Pashka, unwittingly suffocates the child during a seizure, a fascinating sequence in Beanpole.

Two inseparable friends: Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina) (left)  and Iya the Beanpole

Going by the title of the film Beanpole, one would assume the tale is on Iya’s life. But co-scriptwriters Balagov and Terekhov have scripted a tale of two military women, the simple-minded Iya (Beanpole) afflicted with PTSD and her close street-smart friend and colleague Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), who has lost her son Pashka while he was in the care of Iya and cannot conceive another child due to war injuries.  The film ignores Masha’s past as it concentrates on her two current objectives: one, to get married to a loving husband, and two, to bring up another child to replace the dead Pashka to fulfil her motherly instincts.

A fascinating and powerful interaction: Sasha's mother
meets Masha, her aspiring future daughter-in-law over a formal meal

Masha does find her ideal “future” husband in another military man Sasha, who is smitten by Masha and intends to marry her.  But Masha’s dream of marriage is short-lived following a fascinating encounter with Sasha’s mother over a formal dinner.  That dinner sequence depicts a war without bullets fired or tantrums exhibited by either woman. The iciness in the conversation and camera positioning will probably not be forgotten in a long while by any astute film viewer. Sasha’s mother was simply magnetic in delicately underscoring the social differences between her son and her future daughter-in-law. The build-up and the eventual break-up of Masha and Sasha are not of two individuals in love but indicative of the differences between the artificial social equality in the military with its uniforms and the real world where money and class matters either in Leningrad (now St Petersburg, where Bolagov and Sokurov have spent most of their lives).

Masha identifies the possible sperm donor for Iya's future child,
as a replacement for Masha's dead child Pashka
(Note the colour of clothes and the background in the shot)

Balagov’s Beanpole trudges onward to grapple with Masha’s second objective of bringing up a child that she can call her own to replace her dead child Pashka. The film then presents a new complex scenario. Masha cannot conceive a second child due to a war injury. Masha gets her close friend Iya, who is not interested in having sex with men, to conceive a child to fulfil Masha’s emotional needs following the death of Pashka. The outcome is not as important as are the effects of war on men and women alike off the battlefield that Beanpole presents as a larger picture.

Beanpole mirrors Alexeivich’s 1983 Nobel-prize-winning literary work that explored the myriad problems faced by women soldiers after a war concludes.  There is hardly any political undercurrent in Beanpole except when 6 year old Pashka is asked to bark like a dog by friendly elders and is stupefied and unable o respond.  An elder comments that there are no dogs left in Leningrad for Pahka to know how they bark because they have all been eaten—a rare indirect political comment of the food situation within the film.  Beanpole is thus essentially a social and psychological commentary on the plight of women soldiers after a war, either traumatised or injured for life.

The camera accentuates white in this shot by intentionally
incorporating the floor to add white colour to the shot

Beanpole is a significant film as it introduces a major new talent among contemporary Russian filmmakers in Kantemir Balagov, who writes his own original screenplays, and deserved his Best director award at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section.  The various honours at other film festivals for its cinematography (Kseniya Sereda) and the performances of the two female leads confirm the intrinsic worth of this film. A remarkable cinematic work of 2019 from a promising 29-year-old man making his second feature film!

P.S.  Beanpole is one of the author’s top 20 films of 2019. The film won the Best Director award and the FIPRESCI prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival; the Silver Apricot Award at the Yeravan Film Festival of Armenia; the Best Film award at the Montreal Festival of New Cinema; the Impact Award at the Stockholm Film Festival; Achievement in Cinematography and Best Screenplay awards at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards; the Special Jury Prize at the Lisbon and Estoril Film Festival;  the FIPRESCI prize at the Palm Springs International Film Festival (USA); and the Best Actress award at both the Antalya Golden Orange Festival (Turkey) and the Sakhalin International Film Festival (Russia). Two films mentioned in this review The Thin Red Line and Leave No Trace have been reviewed earlier on this blog (click the names of the films to access the reviews).

234. Russian director Aleksei German, Jr.’s sixth feature film “Dovlatov” (2018) (Russia): A soulful reduction of the travails of a Russian writer of repute, intelligently collapsed into six interesting, representative days in 1971 of Brezhnev-era USSR, providing the viewer a mirror image of what director Aleksei German, Sr., endured as a creative filmmaker battling censors in that same timeframe.

“Dovlatov was a sex symbol, an Elvis Presley, a legend (in Russia)” – director Aleksei German, Jr., on the writer Dovlatov,  in an interview published in Sight and Sound

“I saw Brezhnev in my dream. We drank pina coladas and discussed socialism. He promised to help (me get published).” Dovlatov to his mother, waking up in the morning on the first of the “6 days of 1971” shown in the film

Dovlatov is an exceptional film and one of the most mature cinematic works made in 2018. Why is it exceptional?  It encapsulates the world and travails of Russian writer Sergei  Dovlatov (1941-90), friend and contemporary of eventual Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky  and their interactions in Leningrad (now St Petersberg) preceding the decision of Brodsky to emigrate to the United States within a part-realistic, part-fictional representative 6 days of 1971. The year 1971 is typical of a particular Soviet mindset within former USSR (now primarily Russia, having subsequently divested off several Republics as independent countries) when Leonid Brezhnev was its leader and its budding writers and filmmakers had to be included in official Unions (thus toeing official points of view) to flourish in their respective creative fields. Dovlatov was forced to work on a shipyard’s newsletter as a journalist and write on subjects that pleased his employers (the government) while all his 300 odd creative pieces of writing would get rejected by publishers of books and journals.

Dovlatov (Milan Maric), his wife and his daughter stare at the hopelessness
of Dovlatov's future with a miserly income as a journalist
 and no scope of acceptance as a writer

When director Aleksei German, Jr., makes a film on writer Dovlatov and his travails to get his writings published, the filmmaker is merely mirroring the troubles of his own father Aleksei German, Sr. to make his own films in the same time period in USSR.  It was in 1971, the year underlined and projected in the movie Dovlatov, that Aleksei German, Sr., made his film Trial on the Road, a film banned by the Brezhnev regime and one that made the film director famous worldwide when it was released in 1986, when Gorbachev came to power. The film had argued that heroes and traitors were the same, only a matter of differing perspectives.

The wry humour/irony of the Trial on the Road and the problems of his famous father in getting his film released are recast by German, Jr. in Dovlatov through the frustrations of the writer Sergei Dovlatov using a 6-day period of 1971. In that short period, the script includes a bizarre group of actors dressed up as the famous  Russian writers Tolstoy, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky, who evidently know little of the writings of these worthies they represent and mouth inane praises of current political views that are opposite of what those writers had stood for.  The script includes a suicide of an intellectual, black marketing of books, and a sequence where Dovlatov pretends to be a government official arm-twisting the black-market bookseller to divulge the names of the buyers “who are enemies of the state.” While it is humorous to the viewer, the bookseller is none the wiser.  During that short period, the viewer gets a glimpse of how the official book publishers/censors function, how dissidents are picked up by secret police in open restaurants and even an event in a prison camp that Dovlatov witnesses. There is also Dovlatov separated from his wife due to his financial situation and teetering on the edge of divorce proceedings and doting on his loving daughter for whom he hopes to procure a German (a reference to the director’s name, perhaps?) doll from the black market.

Doting father Dovlatov and daughter. The bag contains
yet another rejected manuscript.

An "enemy of the State"  picked up by the police in public while eating a meal

The film Dovlatov has two contrarian aspects: the moody, depressive world of artists who cannot find freedom of expression and the hilarious, wry comedy that involves names of writers and contents of their works contrasted with live realistic situations in 1971 Leningrad.  The soulful, contemplative world is captured visually with fog and snow (the cinematographer is the talented Lukasz Zal of Cold War, Ida, and Loving Vincent fame) and visual compositions of soldiers marching by as a dejected Dovlatov walks by staring at his bleak future while refusing to compromise on the content of his writings with the demands of the State.  The acerbic comedy alternately lifts up the viewer (assuming of course that the viewer is well acquainted with literature).  When a woman is attracted to Dovlatov, who appears to be single, he introduces himself as Franz Kafka and the lady does not blink an eyelid! (The film audience in which I was seated did not react either!)

"Franz Kafka" interacts with one of his many lady admirers

There is a major problem with Dovlatov, the film. The screenplay will only make sense if the viewer is well-exposed to European literature. Brodsky would be another Russian name to many who watch the film, unless they were aware that Dovlatov’s friend went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature soon after he immigrated to USA.

This critic too has yet to read Dovlatov’s famous books The Suitcase: a novel and Pushkin Hills (published long after Dovlatov followed Brodsky and immigrated to USA) but had been  lucky to have read a couple of Dovlatov’s written pieces in English  in the New Yorker magazine published in the 80s. American author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, had praised some of those New Yorker pieces written by Dovlatov . Hopefully the lovely film Dovlatov will prod some viewers to make an effort to read those books and articles in the New Yorker and discover the brilliance of written works. If Russians today idolize him the way Americans idolize Elvis Presley the singer, Dovlatov’s writings must be exceptional.

Dovlatov (back to the camera) is a witness to an escape attempt
at a forced labour camp

There are several praiseworthy aspects to the film. One of those is the ability of script to compact the stifling atmosphere of censorship and its effect on creative people’s lives using Dovlatov, the writer, as a prime example. When Dovlatov encounters an actress dressed as Natasha Rostova (the main female character in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) Dovlatov comments dryly to her “You are very real. And better,” alluding to the state of the character towards the end of the novel.  What Dovlatov acerbically implies here in the script will only make sense to those familiar with the state of the character towards the end in Tolstoy’s novel. The film deserved recognition for its screenplay by film combines talents of Russia, Serbia and Poland.

Manuscripts/pages of books on the floor: a seminal shot of the film,
with Dovlatov dolefully inspecting one of the sheets 

It is sad that this film attracted barely 30 odd viewers at its screening during the International Film Festival of Kerala in Trivandrum (in contrast to other films at the festival that attracted large audiences) and that motley crowd evidently did not react to the humour offered by the script, possibly because they were not familiar with Russian and European literature. While Dovlatov, the film, might not appear as obviously politically critical of Russia as German, Jr.'s earlier work Under Electric Clouds (2015), the former is a more mature work, assuming of course the viewer is able to pick up the subtleties of the film. This critic is confident that Dovlatov, the film, will gain recognition with time and that in turn will lead more people to read the writings of the author Dovlatov.

In the Sight and Sound interview director Aleksei German, Jr., makes it clear that though the film is obviously critical of the Brezhnev regime, he had full support from the current government officials in Russia.

P.S. Dovlatov is one of the top 10 films of 2018 for the author.