SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: When Jean-Pierre Melville opened his crime classic Le Samourai with the image of Alain Delon lying on a bed listening to the solitary chirping of a caged bird, it was clear the French director was making a thematic point about entrapment. When Russia’s Aleksei Fedorchenko opens his film with the shot of two caged birds – buntings – strapped to the back of a bicycle being ridden through a forest, it’s tempting to draw a similar conclusion. But as the film proceeds, this assumption seems decreasingly certain. For all his fascination with the birds, Fedorchenko soon reveals he is concerned less with spiritual entrapment or lack of freedom and more with the disappearance of the customs and culture of the Merjan, the Finno-Ugric people of the Kostroma Oblast region of western Russia.
Silent Souls takes the form of a road movie about a pair of friends from an urban paper mill. When the wife of one of the men – the factory owner – dies, they drive across country to burn her corpse by the side of the Volga river.
The film is, then, a variation on the plot of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, although the American author at least had the sense to put his body in a coffin. Our Merjan pair, after dressing the body according to local custom with 'threads" woven from the dead woman’s pubic hair – surely a cinematic first – simply place her in their car beneath a blanket. It becomes clear this is a common local practice when a policeman at a roadblock peers inside, notices the dead body, and thinks only to ask them about the two birds also in the back of the car. (This may not have been intended to be funny.)
In recent years Russian films such as Roads to Koktobel (not released commercially in Australia but screened on SBS) and The Return have showed how much artistic mileage can still be wrung from the road movie format. But Silent Souls is a little too lacking in visual inspiration – and just a little too close to the stereotype of the 'soulful’ Russian (check the title!) – to be memorable.
This is a form of art cinema that’s far closer to photography and literature than it is to theatre. There’s nothing wrong with that, but even by road movie standards, little happens here in terms of conventional psychology or plotting, and despite the odd arresting image (e.g. a typewriter hurled into an icy lake), the poetic symbolism is rarely striking enough to make up for the dull landscape and the lives whose drabness it seems to symbolise.
If Merjan was once a colourful culture, the film offers little evidence and sometimes unintentionally suggests the opposite. The men’s attitudes to women are, frankly, unreconstructed in the extreme. The widower, for example, takes great pride in telling his friend that he loved his much younger wife because she opened her legs when instructed. The film’s most visually striking moment – a stylised sex scene in which two hookers writhe on the ground in orgasmic bliss – is also indicative of this attitude. Talk about an idealised vision of commodified sex!
