SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: In Kirill Serebrennikov’s bizarre and riveting Betrayal, a man, played by Macedonian actor Dejan Lilic, goes to a doctor for a routine cardiogram. He’s okay physically, but never the less, the doc, played by German actor Franziska Petri, has bad news for him: she explains in a bed side manner that is clinical and unsparingly brutal that the man’s wife is having an affair – with her husband.
full of unsettling digressions
This revelation sends the man into an emotional tailspin, though he has his doubts in regards its authenticity. Once home, he examines his wife’s every move the way a forensic scientist sifts through the detritus of a crime scene for clues. The wife, played by well-known Russian singer-celebrity Albina Dzhanabaeva, shows no signs of infidelity. Indeed, she is a picture of devotion.
Still, the doctor pursues the man, and drawers him into pursuing the issue; incidentally, Serebrennikov does not name his characters, preferring to preserve their identity in terms of their story roles ('He’, 'She’ etc.), like characters in some fractured, adult fairytale. Like a tour guide, the doctor persuades the man to visit the 'secret sites’ with her, those places that give shape to her husband and his wife’s betrayal: the park bench where they meet, the hotel they use for their trysts, the room in that hotel they have sex in"¦ Now convinced, the man is angry and vulnerable. He begins a joyless affair with the doctor.
There are more twists, which I’m not prepared to talk about in any detail here because one of the many incidental pleasures of Serebrennikov’s film is the way it catches you by surprise. Still, I can testify that the film shocks and shakes; there’s death and the plot entangles the characters into a murder investigation that may not be an investigation of any murder at all. Serebrennikov and co-screenwriter Natalia Nazarova are playing a weird and enigmatic game here where obsessive behavior leads into a psychic maze where there is no exit.
The film’s airy sense of strangeness is not just a matter of narrative. (The film plays with time, motivation and that great trope of art-cinema, 'is it real, or is it fantasy?’) The film is full of unsettling digressions; for instance, soon after the man is informed that his wife may well be having an affair, he witnesses a terrible accident in the hospital car park that leads to a number of fatalities.
And the film’s disturbing sense of other-worldliness is also very much a matter of visual style, too. Recent Russian art cinema tends toward the bleak and sociologically authentic, but this is not the project here. Serebrennikov and cinematographer Oleg Lukichev create a world of shadows and space; Serebrennikov is one of the best 'directors of architecture’ I’ve seen since Michael Mann, in that the physical environment is not simply a matter of mood, place and spectacle, but an abstraction that sends us of to ponder all kinds of poetic possibilities.
The performances are a major part of the film’s stylisation as well: everyone here is strong but Franziska Petri is especially good. With her wild eyes and grim physicality, she is like some alien figure from a parallel universe; recognisable, but definitely peculiar and in some way superior. Yet, she becomes ultimately a sympathetic figure because the major secret she does not quite reveal to all the other characters is that her pain, in the face of betrayal, is real; and its significant that Serebrennikov allows only the audience access to that fact.
Still, Betrayal is destined to be a film to be argued over. At the screening I attended at the Sydney Film Festival, there were arguments the second the end titles rolled. Most of the discussion overheard was along the lines of, 'so, what happened in the end? Don’t you get you it?’ Speaking for myself, I was seduced. In a cinema so bent on certainty and clarity and neat morals, it’s a tonic to see a film that is prepared to create a parable where the conventional pieties are so readily ridiculed. All that remains here are the ghosts of desire.
