RUSSIAN RESURRECTION FILM FESTIVAL: Balanced on the wavering distinction between memory and imagination, reality and fantasy, Klim Shipenko’s modest thriller unfolds slowly, giving you time to consider what you’re seeing and to wonder what you don’t know. It is a worthy technique, acknowledging that too many thrillers confuse threat with tension; in this film, produced by Daywatch and Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov, the action is limited but the moral possibilities are boundless.
Found wandering around the train station in the Ukrainian seaside city of Sebastopol by police, the unknown man (Aleksandr Yatsenko) deposited into the care of detective Shumov (Anatoliy Belyy) can say little more than 'I don’t remember". The man has a blank, confused look on his face, as if he can’t quite comprehend the sheer lack of knowledge he has about himself. Yet the poorly dressed, physically healthy John Doe, who is temporarily christened Kolya by the psychiatrist called in to examine him, Dr. Trophimov (Sergey Ganarov), also has an improbably large wad of cash on him, which is enough to worry the authorities.
Per the title, Kolya is a mystery, but the investigation isn’t the focus, it’s the parallel scenes that reveal the man’s background and, specifically, his actions the previous day. Kolya is Pasha, an attendant on a beach in a nearby town. He is, you realise, always somewhat blank: living with his mother, working a dead-end job having abandoned his dream of being a photographer. As his previous day unfolds, with Pasha visiting Sebastopol to see a girl but being stood up, the question is what transformed him from the quiet young man into the shell blankly sitting before his inquisitors?
He’s going nowhere quite slowly, and the story uses his lack of identity to portray the way young Russians, disaffected by their lives and lack of opportunity, can remake themselves to disastrous effect. Dr Trophimov is reminded of his own daughter, whose own attempts to change her life ended badly, while a journalist and former flame of Shumov’s, Oksana (Viktoriya Tolstoganova), wonders if all things considered their subject actually gained a second chance to start again with a clean slate.
Pasha’s previous day revolves around Anna (Zhanna Friski), a famous but disaffected actress whose profession encourages the same failing that befalls her unlikely companion. 'It keeps getting harder to realise who I am," she laments, even as the pair’s day together grows both more unlikely and stylised. As in Guiseppe Tornatore’s A Pure Formality, where Roman Polanski interrogated a baffled Gerard Depardieu, various cinematic deceptions are underway, but the low-key setting of deserted foreshores and Shumov’s ramshackle office, allied with the punctual but never overplayed performances, keeps you focused on the characters instead of second guessing the denouement.
The movie is occasionally workmanlike – Shumov is introduced by driving up to a crime scene, stepping under the boundary tape, pausing to light a cigarette and then asking of his subordinate, 'So what do you have?" – but it’s never completely clear about what is most worrying: What could have happened to Pasha, or what Pasha might have done? That’s enough to keep you watching until the end.
