RUSSIAN RESSURECTION FILM FESTIVAL: When the words 'Siberia 1945 – Krai, a Gulag labour outpost" appear on the screen at the beginning of this winner of the best film award at Russia’s film academy, you could be forgiven for girding your loins for a tough and worthily dry sit. A relentlessly grim tale, filled with lashings of cruelty, starvation and despair is surely in store, yes?
Well, no, as it turns out. It’s true that this story about a decorated war hero, Ignat (Vladimir Mashkov), taking up a posting as a Stalinist open-air prison’s chief railway engineer, makes it clear that life in the camp is harsh. But it’s not particularly interested in the plight of the camp inhabitants – Russians accused of collaborating with Germany – or even the politics of the Gulag under Joseph Stalin. Instead this is a trainspotter’s film about the lost age of steam, a cinematic love letter to the locomotive in which the smell of oil, the heat of the furnace and the dampness of steam is almost palpable throughout.
The plot of this funny-peculiar fable centres on Ignat’s obsession with locomotives and his reckless individualism. No sooner has he arrived than he steals a prisoner’s woman, a blonde called Sofia, before discovering a character as tough and individualistic as himself. This is a feral young German woman who has been living on a nearby island for four years. She has survived by hunting bears and sheltering in an abandoned steam train. (Whatever else can be said about The Edge, you can’t complain you’ve seen it all before.)
After swimming to the island – miraculously surviving an icy, raging torrent – Ignat captures the woman and forces her to co-operate as he gets the engine working again and performs a makeshift repair job on the collapsed bridge that leads back to the mainland. This enables both of them to bring the liberated train across to the camp. As you may have divined by now, The Edge is not a realistic narrative, though despite an occasional passing resemblance to the outlandishness of Serbia’s Emir Kusturica, neither is it a black comedy or a scathing satire.
I can just about see why the Russians were tempted to make this their official entry into the Oscar foreign language category, for it’s a film that looks impressive. Director Aleksei Uchitel, who made 2003’s intriguing near real-time The Stroll, has an undeniable talent for the arrangement of visual elements within the frame. The film is magnificently staged, especially a scene featuring a race between two locomotives.
But it soon becomes only too clear why the film then failed to make the Academy shortlist. For all the vigour on screen, Ignat is a forbidding and insufficiently engaging character, and the film outlives its welcome long before the end of its 124 minutes.
Are there aspects of The Edge that might be obvious to Russians while remaining obscure to outsiders? It’s hard to say. Too often I had questions whose answers remained frustratingly out of reach. Where are the armed guards to keep the prisoners in line? If this is a labour camp, why do we not see what it is the prisoners are labouring at? (So much of it’s filmed around the steam engines that it looks as if the setting is actually a railway workshop, rather than a Gulag.) Why introduce Ignat as a character suffering major fainting fits without following them up? If a bearskin tied to a train at one stage is obviously symbolic of Russia, what exactly is the symbolic point being made?
Finally, why should anyone care about any of this, given that, for all the cinematic technique on display, the characters are so poorly developed?
