A film review: "Zheleznaya doroga" [2007 Russia]

I'd been working backward through the filmography of Aleksey Fedorchenko, and was pleased to see that his Fellini-esque surreal comedy from 2007, "Zheleznaya doroga" [Eng. Title: The Railway] was as much an allegory as a visual feast.











The hilarious premise posits a school headmaster hatching a rather unusual plot to make up for a shortfall in the school's funding - by smuggling out coal from abandoned mines in the town's vicinity, on a disused railway line that was heading south into the vast Russian Steppes. Thanks to a mistaken belief that coal was in high demand in that region, he sets about laying his plans in secret so that others wouldn't catch wind.

He persuades a pal (Sergey Belyaev) with his kid Mishka (Daniil Shavkunov) to join the endeavour, and after dusting off a beast of a Soviet-era locomotive languishing in a museum, they enlist the services of an equally ancient driver (Pyotr Zaychenko) who'd apparently gone feral in the rusty overgrown railway yard. As the film progresses, the driver and his relationship with the locomotive become an important part of the narrative.

After stocking the lone wagon in the train with sacks of coal collected by the school children, the foursome set-off on a surreal journey passing through disappeared stations, abandoned towns and meet some extraordinary characters along the way, including the remnants of a circus troupe that had gone missing in the Steppes many years ago.

By the time they reach their destination, they'd used up and bartered away the coal that they were transporting for largely worthless bric-a-brac, exchanged by desperate locals still surviving in middle-of-nowhere towns. Perhaps they were waiting for the trains to return, or perhaps they'd given up all hope of making it elsewhere. Much of the narrative is from the viewpoint of Mishka who observes goings on armed with a creative license.

We meet giants, acrobats, and man-eating school children, and Luisa (Olga Degtyaryova), a sex-hungry redhead who boards the train after the headmaster proposes to her with a ring exchanged for coal by an old woman without fingers. Mishka listens to his father give varying accounts of his mother's (Elena Veshkurtseva) gruesome/heroic death, and imagines each time saving her in a miraculous manner. Their journey, it turns out, is in fact a yearning for love...

Almost every aspect of the characterisation can be seen in an allegorical or literal sense, depending on your frame of mind. But they're equally absurd, delightful, and moving either way, thanks to Fedorchenko's genius and sense of humour. Steeped in irony and loaded with dry wit, the film is a prime example of Russian cinema at its creative best. Needless to say, this little gem is Highly Recommended Viewing..!

 

The Nudity: Olga Degtyaryova, Elena Veshkurtseva, and others
Olga Degtyaryova, as the redhead, appears nude in a couple of scenes, and there is brief nudity from other actors during the rest of the film.



.

Irina Vilkova from "Eyo zvali Mumu" [Russia 2016]

I haven't had the chance to see any of Vladimir Mirzoev's work until his recent drama, "Eyo zvali Mumu" [Eng. Title: They Called Her Mumu]. The only reason I came upon this one was because it was shared on Vimeo recently.







But since I had to watch it without subtitles, the significance (or otherwise) of the film completely evaded me, so I'll restrict my observations to the barest of details, and of course, the rather liberally sprinkled scenes of nudity. The offbeat film is supposedly based on a real-life social media personality who went by the name of Katya Mumu. In the film, Mumu (Irina Vilkova) is employed 'informally' by the Russian secret services for an undercover operation to discredit some prominent political opposition figures.

Mumu seduces and has affairs with their subjects with the intent of exposing and defaming them through social media, apparently with tacit approval even from her family members. But the freedom-loving rebel inside her resurfaces after a while, and she tries to break free from her employers's diktats. The film ends with her running away after starting a fire in her apartment. The film is well-produced even with a low-budget, has a cool soundtrack, and is also humorous in places. Perhaps the film should be Recommended Viewing - for those who could follow Russian.

Vimeo Link

 

The Nudity: Irina Vilkova and Irina Butanaeva
There are at least six scenes that feature nudity from Irina Vilkova who plays the central character 'Mumu' - some of which are also funny in a very 'Russian' way. Irina Butanaeva plays a maid/assistant and appears partially nude during a scene with one of Mumu's 'boyfriends'.



.

A film review: "Kray" [2010 Russia]

Aleksey Uchitel's action-packed adventure drama "Kray" [Eng. Title: the Edge] is set in a Siberian labour camp (gulag) immediately after the end of the Second World War.

Ignat (Vladimir Mashkov) - a decorated War hero, is sent to work as a locomotive mechanic in the labour camp, despite carrying symptoms associated with PTSD, like frequent blackouts. He wasn't supposed to operate those metal beasts either, but in the unusually lenient camp where safety regulations are nothing more than recommendations that can be set aside due to necessity, Ignat manages to do just that.

The greater (and more interesting) part of the film is about Ignat's resourcefulness in not only reviving and taking possession of an abandoned old locomotive, but also retrieving it through a "little bit broken" bridge so that it could be put back in use. He is helped along the way by feisty young German Elza (Anjorka Strechel), who'd made the locomotive her home for a number of years. She'd been hiding in the island to escape the clutches of a murdering sergeant, and locked out from the outside world, wasn't even aware that there was a war. Nor was she aware that all Germans in Russia were henceforth seen as the enemy.

Friction arises when Ignat brings Elza to live in the camp, especially with inmate and young mother Sofiya (Yuliya Peresild) who'd been sharing her bed with him. Local jealousies come to a head when Ignat defends Elza against the open hostility shown towards her, that they soon had to leave, but not before an eventful locomotive chase to rescue Elza from the deranged sergeant Major Fishman (Sergey Garmash), who recognised her as the girl who escaped years ago.

Despite the film's apparently mainstream appeal, it is technically well produced with appealing cinematography, set design and sound engineering. It gives us a vivid account of ordinary life inside a gulag and its internal economy. But for a foreign audience, the stars will naturally be the plain yet magnificent Soviet-era steam locomotives bellowing across the snowy landscape. Rail enthusiast or not, the audience will easily find the film entertaining. Recommended Viewing!

Amazon.de DVD Link [PAL]

 

The Nudity: Yuliya Peresild, Anjorka Strechel, and others
Apart from a sex scene with Sofiya and Ignat, there is a bathing scene where Sofiya gets into an argument with Elza and things get a bit physical.



.

A film review: "Angely revolyutsii" [2014 Russia]

There's now plenty of proof that Aleksey Fedorchenko has a deep reverence and fascination for the customs of ethnic tribes that cohabit his motherland. While his moving Silent Souls (2010) touched on the funerary rituals of the Merya, and his richly exotic anthology Celestial Wives of Meadow Mari (2012) boisterously celebrated Mari womanhood, his more recent "Angely revolyutsii" [Eng. Title: Angels of Revolution] is an unfettered re-imagining of a factual Soviet suppression of the Siberian Nentsy and Khanty people during the Kazym Rebellion.













But Fedorchenko, being who he is, doesn't present the film with a conventional historical narrative, but rather like a poetic retelling of a myth; exercising generous artistic license while presenting his facts. There are true-life characters nevertheless in the film, like Polina (Darya Ekamasova), a noted revolutionary and performance artist, who is assigned the task of 'civilising' the aforementioned tribes; by encouraging them to embrace Soviet ideology, join mainstream society, and give up their pastoral lifestyle and move into permanent homes in their newly built town.

To this effect, she enlists the help of four fellow avant-gardists; film maker Pyotr (Pavel Basov), photographer and sculptor Zakhar (Georghi Iobadze), architect and coffin-maker Nikolay (Konstantin Balakirev), and theatre director Smirnov (Aleksey Solonchev). Together, they set off to the Taiga on a mission that Polina hopes would intellectually enlighten the tribes and make them appreciate modern art.

But the Khanty are aloof to this enforced 'meeting of civilisations', and at times barely tolerate their uninvited presence. While they might have been mildly bemused watching their works and antics at the beginning, they soon grow tired of them and refuse to 'join the collective', and events take an inevitably tragic turn once their respective irreconcilable positions are established, and the State decides to have the last say...

There is more to the film than meets the casual eye - be it artistic, political, or philosophical. Federchenko doesn't make it any easier for us by refusing to feed us the historical pretext for the conflict. In my case, one had to score through festival interviews and the wiki to get acquainted with collectivisation during the early days of Soviet Union. It is ironic that the avant-garde artists, themselves a minority who'll soon to be 'collectivised' by the state, were press-ganged into persuading other minorities. It is also worrying to see that states; red, blue, or whatever their hue, have found it irresistible to homogenise their entire population to control them better - it shows how incredibly fragile human civilisation has always been.

Fedorchenko's film provokes debate on ethics, ideology, and humanism itself. And after the final scene in an apartment in present-day Kazym, in which we see an elderly Khanty woman singing a tribal song while looking into the camera, we are left wondering who the angels of revolution indeed were - were they the avant-garde artists who were sacrificed for a now defunct Soviet state, or are they the disparate tribal cultures that still survive, albeit by the skin of their teeth, a quarter of a century after the revolution itself has ended.

To say that the cinematography and production design is exceptional would be stating the bleeding obvious - one can hold a photographic exhibition by simply blowing up some of the film's key frames and mounting them on a wall. They would need neither titles nor descriptions - quirky, surreal, humorous, and tragic, they'd be probing artworks on their own. Of course, good photography doesn't equate to good cinematography, but films with a master like Fedorchenko at the helm make a pleasant exception. A particularly mesmerising scene is still haunting - where Pyotr projects his film on a cloud of smoke bellowing from a wintry night's campfire. I could go on - but will end by stating that this gem is Highly Recommended Viewing..!

 

The Nudity: Polina Aug
Polina Aug plays Anna, Zakhar's model and muse, and briefly appears topless during one of the photo shoots.



.

A film review: "Territory" [2015 Russia]

Aleksandr Melnik's "Territoriya" [Eng. Title: Territory] is a remake of an earlier Soviet film about the Siberian Gold Rush of the late fifties and early sixties. Of course, the term needs to be applied rather selectively, because it was only the Soviet state involved in this particular 'rush'.











The film's intended focus is a celebrated geologist's attempts to persuade teams of geologists working on various assignments in the rugged Siberian tundra to get involved in prospecting for gold. He succeeds to some extent, thanks to the pioneering and adventure spirit of those involved.

We see tenacious men endure extreme conditions in the northeastern corner of Siberia - this is no place for the faint-hearted; some set out on foot, even unaccompanied, on treks to desolate barren lands, where they have to overcome ice, rapids, and other inaccessible terrain to reach their destination. Some of them don't quite succeed despite their valiant efforts, while some persevere, and discover gold.

The film's strengths: Firstly, it's the location, location, location; its the abundance of breathtaking and awe inspiring landscapes - and one will simply run out of superlatives in describing the unspoilt, untamed, and unforgiving form of nature that's so lovingly captured in film. It also puts into perspective the insignificance of man, and yet his heroic effort in battling himself in 'taming' it. The other strength is its main cast, who perform reasonably well.

The film's weaknesses: Unfortunately, there are several, and they're mainly to do with the narrative, like the totally unnecessary voice-over narration. It distracts from a film that could so easily have been contemplative and poetic. I had to turn off my subtitles for a slightly different reason though; it prevented me from appreciating the sheer majesty of the visuals we're seeing. And I knew I won't be missing anything important, because the droll female voice narrating the film was, for the most part, explaining what the persons on screen were thinking or feeling, like in a comic strip.

Another problem with the film, surprisingly and against the grain of what was commented above, is its rather 'mainstream' cinematography. Geology is an important focus for the film, and yet we barely find an appreciation for it in the way these landscapes, which are also geologically interesting, are depicted - it's all seen with a commoner's eye. Even if one allows for the fact that this is a feature film as opposed to a documentary, it wasn't aiding the narrative. But if you enjoy natural landscapes, especially anything above and beyond the Arctic circle, you'll love this film - only, remember to switch off the subtitles!

 

The Nudity: Grigoriy Dobrygin (?), and Tamara Obutova
The film starts with a brief yet funny sequence, when the dogs bolt along with the sleigh when their master slept. He wakes up and runs after them in the nude. There is also a scene featuring an Eskimo girl (Tamara Obutova) going about her chores half-nude, apparently in accordance to tradition. She puts on a shirt only after noticing that the stranger that they rescued had woken up.



.

Shining still: "A zori zdes tikhie" [2015, Russia]

Renat Davletyarov has faithfully recreated a shortened version of a famous Soviet film by the same name "A zori zdes tikhie" [Eng. Title: The Dawns Here Are Quiet]. The World War II drama is an adaptation of a novel partly based on an actual military engagement in a remote corner of 1942 Soviet Union.












Some of the best World War II films focus on relatively unknown 'minor skirmishes' that happened on the sidelines of main events, often featuring unevenly matched opponents, and this film is one such classic example. It begins with an army commander ordering the transfer of a unit of soldiers manning an anti-aircraft gun in a remote part of the Soviet Union, following complaints of their increasingly frequent and disruptive drunken brawls over local women.

In their place, Vaskov (Pyotr Fyodorov), the Sergeant Major in-charge is resupplied with a group of young trainee female volunteers - they were chosen not only for their unlikely proclivity to either get drunk or fight over local women, but also because the remote area was considered relatively 'safe' since it hadn't seen war so far. The bewildered and old-fashioned Major nevertheless accepts and builds new quarters for them keeping in mind their 'feminine' needs.

One of the new volunteers, returning after a secret rendezvous with her mother and son living in the area, witnesses and reports seeing two German soldiers in the woods. Rightly guessing the likely reason for them being here, Vaskov takes five of the girl soldiers to intercept them using a little known short-cut through marshland. Upon catching up with the intruders, Vaskov realises that there are not just two, but sixteen elite Germans paratroopers in that group, armed to the teeth with machine guns and explosives; certainly too many to handle with his limited resources.

He sends one of the girls back in order to alert the local headquarters, and decides to halt or delay the Germans' progress until reinforcements arrived. But they don't arrive, and Vaskov and the remaining four girls will stage a foolhardy but mightily heroic struggle to stop the highly trained and professional enemy. As they improvise and use unconventional tactics, Vaskov and his crew develop a bond that will strengthen their resolve to prevent the enemy from succeeding, at any cost...

Stanislav Rostotskiy's original 1972 version of this film, at nearly twice its length, is epic not only in its scope where the traditional role of men protecting women is frequently reversed, but also in its gripping human drama - of dreams shattered and families destroyed due to the war, shown using the women's individual flashbacks, and of the high value they attach to pride and honour. The rookie girl-soldiers display extraordinary courage in the face of insurmountable odds, and reflect a Russian mindset that goes beyond what might be construed as communist propaganda.

While the latest version respectfully follows the original, at times to the minutest detail such as casting and dialogue - after all the original had become part of local folklore not just in Russia but in former Soviet nations as well, it updates the same using modern cinema techniques and more experienced actors. The flashbacks and back-story are there in the new version too, but they're relatively brief in order to fit the narrative within a shorter runtime. However, there are elements in the original that I wish were retained, like the grown up children of these women visiting the site of their mothers' heroic struggle years later, as if to remind themselves of the price paid during the great patriotic war for their present (relative) liberty. My favourite will remain the original version, but for what it is, the latest version does a decent job of reinterpreting the original without reinventing the characters and storyline. While the original version is Highly Recommended Viewing, the latest interpretation should at least be Recommended Viewing..!

Original 1972 version: Amazon 2-Disc DVD Link [PAL]

 

The Nudity:
2015 version: Evgeniya Malakhova, Anastasiya Mikulchina, Sofya Lebedeva, Agniya Kuznetsova, Kristina Asmus, Ekaterina Vilkova, and others
1972 version: Irina Dolganova, Yelena Drapeko, Yekaterina Markova, Olga Ostroumova, Irina Shevchuck, and others

The nude scene in both versions is about a rare bath offered to the girls as reward for successfully shooting down a German reconnaissance plane. There is an additional brief scene under a waterfall in the 2015 version. The best thing about both the scenes is that they feature the film's five main female protagonists in the nude instead of merely relying on extras to fill up the frame, as is often the case these days.



.

A film review: "Cargo 200" [2007, Russia]

The allegorical Soviet drama "Gruz 200" [Eng. Title: Cargo 200] is one of Aleksey Balabanov's most important and uninhibited films to date. It is also lesser known than his highly acclaimed "Brother" duology for the very same reason - for being unsparing to his audience in a Gaspar Noé kind of way.









Set amongst the industrial wastelands of 1984 Soviet Union, and apparently based on some true events, the film is a scathing critique of a system and society as Balabanov recalls it from his younger days. Meant as much as to shock as remind a growing number of Russians who have begun to look back at the past through rose-tinted glasses, the film minces no words in highlighting the rotten state of terror, corruption, and depravity that barely lay concealed behind its thin veneer of socialism.

At first glance, the main plot might vaguely resemble your average American slasher from the eighties, but this film takes it a step further by making a pointed observation of a nation's sadness and collective impotence that drowned itself in alcohol and madness. Two sub-plots cross paths one after the other in a bootlegger's farm on the outskirts of Leninsk - just as a corrupt professor of Scientific Atheism (Leonid Gromov) fixes his broken down car and leaves the farm after a heated religious debate with its owner (Aleksey Serebryakov), a happy-go-lucky youth (Leonid Bichevin) drops by to buy some booze for the night. He'd also brought along a girl he'd picked up at the nightclub, a Government official's daughter named Angelika (Agniya Kuznetsova).

A murder happens that night, and Angelika is sexually assaulted and kidnapped by a psychopathic police captain named Zhurov (Aleksey Poluyan), after the youth and owner of the farm have passed out drinking. The owner's wife Antonina (Natalya Akimova) does little to intervene in both the crimes owing to a secret pact between her husband and the captain dating back to the time they served time together in a Gulag. And her kidnap is only the beginning of Angelika's ordeal...

'Cargo 200' is euphemism in Police parlance for the unmentionable reality of coffins arriving with dead soldiers from the war in Afghanistan. Balabanov makes a direct connection of wasted lives to the prevailing sense of social and moral decay, and accuses people, including the audience, of being part of the problem. In a telling scene, we see a platoon of young soldiers briskly climb aboard an IL-76 from which coffins are also simultaneously unloaded. Perhaps, it requires a nationalistic film maker like Balabanov to drive home the message that nostalgic eyes do tend to retain a blind spot for finer but essential details when recounting a 'glorious' past.

The film is exceedingly well directed and put together, and its thoughtful, carefully period-graded cinematography and superlative editing misleadingly make it appear all too easy. Balabanov clearly knows what it takes to tell a story rather well. But whilst this menacing and dreary film isn't exactly easy-viewing, it nevertheless emanates a strong whiff of dark humour even during the grizzliest of moments. In a memorable scene, Zhurov's alcohol and telly-addicted mother complains to a visitor about flies in her apartment, where Zhurov was also holding Angelika captive.

And I have barely touched upon the gloriously grimy set-design, magnificently brooding industrial landscape, and the jarringly anachronistic but true-to-period pop-music soundtrack - their combined effect will haunt you for days after you've put away your DVD. Needless to say, this horrifying masterpiece is Highly Recommended Viewing..!

Amazon.com DVD Link [NTSC] | Amazon.com Instant Video Link

 

The Nudity: Agniya Kuznetsova
Two hysterically morbid scenes feature nudity; it goes without saying that neither of them are pleasant to watch. The first is when Capt. Zhurov brings home a prisoner to sexually 'please' Angelika because he couldn't do it himself. The second, longer scene shows Angelika chained to the bed totally nude and lying next to the decomposing corpses of her soldier-fiancé and the prisoner who failed to please her enough. Zharov will be reading back to Angelika the letters that her fiancé sent her when Antonina comes barging in.



.

A film review: "Time of Darkness" [1991, Russia]

Occasionally we bump into a film only when looking for something else. An exploration into early post-Soviet Russian cinema led me to Vladimir Alenikov's medieval drama "Time of Darkness" [Russian Title: Fiofaniya, risuyushchaya smert], made originally in English. Produced by an American company, and even starring George Segal, it was also a general indicator of the US-Russia bonhomie at the time.











The low-budgeted film is set in eleventh century Russia, a period when many rural communities still practised their old pagan faiths, and newly arrived Christian missionaries were trying to convert them (which they achieved, but pagan ideas such as witchcraft and babkas (spiritual healers) are still fairly popular today). A spate of crimes erupt in a remote village after a summer festival, and young women newly converted to Christianity begin to get killed. While village chief Grigory (George Segal) attributes these attacks to a werewolf living in the woods, Fiofaniya (Tamara Tana), the healer-woman, after examining their bodies, believes that they were raped and killed by someone in the village.

Fiofaniya also has the ability to have 'visions'. It will help her piece together events leading up to the murder, but she wont be able identify the killer itself because he'd donned a carnival mask, like many other men in the village, during each attack. The heady mix of superstition, myth, and religion will make any effort at solving the crimes impossible, until Fiofaniya stumbles across a clue that'll lead her to the killer. She'll soon face mortal danger herself; with villagers fearing that she might be a witch, and the killer inciting the crowd to lock her inside the house and set it ablaze, almost replicating the fate that befell her own mother at a different village...

Its historical setting and the pagan-Christian conflict may be vaguely reminiscent of Andrei Rublev, but this is certainly not a Tarkovsky - and to its credit, it doesn't even pretend to be one. This is just a good ole American B-movie, more accurately, a Russian attempt at making one, that has every right to share the same shelf as the Conan epics in your friendly neighbourhood VHS library. The director has later gone on to do more memorable work, but this film is all comic strip-style material with a dodgy screenplay, B-movie style.

And yet, it couldn't help itself trying to be artistic at times, in a minimalist sort of way. Given its budget, it has managed to recreate authentic-looking sets and especially the corpses, but I have reason to believe that they might have also killed or maimed a real wolf while making the film, possibly for added authenticity. Either that, or it must've been a surprisingly clever piece of filmmaking for its time. Nevertheless what kept me engaged, were the bevy of undeniably beautiful actresses appearing in the film, and often in various stages of undress. These may or may not be the right reason for watching the film, but the extra spice certainly enhances the exotic storyline and lends it historical legitimacy (although I'm not sure about the extent to which Slavic pagans practised witch-burning).

Amazon.de DVD Link [PAL]
There is a much cheaper DVD available as well, but it is German dubbed. I also can't attest to the DVD's quality because mine is an older non-remastered NTSC edition, not available in Amazon at the time of posting.

 

The Nudity: Tatyana Novik, Tamara Tana, Mariya Korolyova, Zoya Simonova, & others
The film features nudity in a variety of public spaces; when people conduct medieval fertility rituals,  bathe in the lake, are pursued through woods, and also features a Lady Godiva-style stride through the village, sans the horse.



.