RUSSIAN RESURRECTION FILM FESTIVAL Director Alexei Balabanov is routinely characterised as the current enfant terrible of Russian cinema. His work including the hit Brat (Brother in English, 1997, which I have to confess I haven’t yet seen), Gruz 200 (2007) and Morphine (2008) are frequently referred to in recent media coverage as 'controversial", 'extreme", and boldly 'ultra-violent". For fans, Balabanov’s work seems to be read as a savage and bitter allegory for Russia’s social decay in a post-Soviet culture aided and abetted by political complacency and – as the director would have it – a people corrupted by free-form capitalism and an insidious ethnic bigotry. Though for some, and the director seems to attract many detractors, this bleak world-view is seen as cultural self-hatred, and a useless death force. No less a figure than veteran Soviet director Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt by the Sun, 1992) derided the hero of Balabanov’s Brat as a potential threat to the spiritual welfare of Russian youth!
Still, all this lofty talk doesn’t do much to capture the unique and deeply strange mystique of Balabanov’s cinema. A Stoker, his new film, seen in Rotterdam earlier this year, is fascinating, idiosyncratic filmmaking at its best. In terms of technique and style, imagine a mongrel cross between the violent minimalism of Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, 2002) and the early black comedy of Aki Kaurismäki (Leningrad Cowboys Go America, 1989) and even that comparison falls short of truly capturing what’s so splendidly loopy about A Stoker.
For starters, Balabanov seems in no hurry at first to tell a story or stage particularly high powered dramatic scenes. Repetition is the stylistic keynote here. For instance, there’s a motif here where at one point or other we see each of the main characters trudging alone through near-empty streets in a run down urban-scape in ankle high snow (apparently outer St Petersburg). These moments go on and on. And under the shots he’ll plant some very jaunty, apparently Latin influenced, music (the guitar comes from Didula). This stuff has attracted all sorts of interpretations; it’s been called a 'portrait of how cheap life is in the former Soviet Union" and a grace note of 'alienation". That all sounds valid, but I think Balabanov wants to goad the audience, to make us aware of the technique, to play with conventions and confound expectations. He’ll do things that seem to 'set-up’ a situation, only to deflate it.
It’s a smart strategy since it slowly but inexorably builds an extraordinary tension, one that pays off in the movie’s last few minutes, when the film’s cast of disinterested, solemn, remote characters start to act on their bottled-up emotions – and the effect is truly explosive. The plot is pure gangster film, but like I suggested, it’s highly dramatic narrative contours are played out in 'slow motion’.
The Stoker of the title (played by veteran actor Mikhail Skryabin) is a dupe of hoods, a flunky who passively accepts the responsibility for burning bodies of murder victims in a giant furnace he spends his days tending. A shell-shocked Hero of the Soviet Union and Yakut (an ethnic minority of Siberia), the softly spoken man of few words lives in the stove room – a basement space of stone, that looks like a set from a gothic horror – and in between shovels, he taps out a novel, while worrying about his beautiful young daughter Sasha (Aida Tumutova), who is in the fur business with Masha (Anna Korotaeva), the daughter of crime-king Sergeant (Alexander Mosin), who in turn is Skryabin’s boss.
The character that unites the action and ultimately drives the plot is Bison (Yuri Matveyev) a stone-faced hitman who doesn’t say much (he just nods a lot, even when the question seems to require a verbalisation, as when one his lovers asks, 'Do you love me?"). Bison is having sex with both Masha and Sasha. This leads to bloodshed, tragedy, and an existential despair for the Stoker who muses near the end of the film that war had clarity, where there was no ambiguity about just who the enemy was. When he finds that loyalty, friendship, his sacrifice and his 'good work" mean nothing he decides that in modern Russia there’s no hope if the enemy is no longer 'out there" but"¦ within.
The jokes are black, and the film is dense with the kind of moments celebrated by 'midnight movie’ cultists everywhere: casual full frontal nudity, un-romanticised simulated sex and very bloody, sudden violence. Right at the end Balabanov adds a coda where we 'see’ dramatised a fragment of the novel the Stoker was working on"¦ it’s a historical piece full of violence and tragedy. It’s an ironic riff but it deepens the Stoker’s character.
Still, you get the feeling that Balabanov isn’t the kind of film artist who is indulging in a form of pessimistic grandeur. The sad note the film ends on feels deeply felt – it's very affecting.
