Tag: Soviet Union

The Execution (Kazn)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TRANSYLVANIA

This is a crime thriller with enough twists to make Agatha Christie proud. An unpredictable, non-linear serial killer drama from Russia, Execution is a bloody, bruise and highly nasty film from debut director Lado Kvataniya. With echoes of Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-Ho, 2003), Old Boy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) and David Fincher’s Mindhunter (2017-19) and Zodiac (2007), The Execution a confident and exciting genre picture that doubles up as an allegory of the last, fading days of the Soviet Union.

It’s freely inspired by the true story of Andrei Tchikatilo, who murdered, sexually assaulted and mutilated at least 52 women and children in the 80s 80s. While the USA had experience building psychological profiles of killers from the mid-20th century, this was the first time the Soviet Union had to pursue such a case, leading to much confusion among the politburo.

Nikoloz Tavadze is perfect in the main role as the lead investigator in the case. With a similar gait and frame to Ivan Lapshin in Alexey German’s classic My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985), he occupies a similar world of paranoia and crumbling institutions, with lone men given free rein to be both judge, jury and execution. With intense pressure from above, the police commit unspeakable brutality in order to pursue their cases, showing how the solution can often approximate the same level of the problem. The myth of the Etruscan Execution is invoked, whereby the perpetrator is attached to the body of the victim until both bodies turn black. Of course, we’ll see something to that effect by the end, but its how it gets there that keeps us riveted throughout.

The film starts in 1991, but the killer starts in 1978, the film freely hopping between and playing with time, slowly revealing layer after layer during its luxurious runtime. The non-linear approach is a smart one, as the story is as much about how information is doled out as what we know from the start. And no matter how much you predict what’s going to happen, there’s simply no way to have a clear grip on how brilliantly this film reaches its final conclusion.

Mixing a romantic atmosphere with the utter darkness of man, it often feels more South Korean than Russian, especially in the way that lurid violence is tied to character and its portentous sense of destiny and forward momentum. While it often strains towards the absurd, its excesses seem necessary given the lurid subject matter. All the while, the heads of state seem useless to stop the killer or rein in the reckless behaviour of its officers. Considering torture is still commonplace in Russian prisons, it has an all-too present day resonance.

Considering that it’s from Russia, the chances of it playing in the UK are incredibly slim. Yet one hopes that when the awful invasion is finally over, it will have a chance to be discovered as a solid genre programmer worth pursuing.

The Execution plays in Competition at TIFF, running from 17th to 26th June.

Goodbye Soviet Union (Hüvasti, NSVL)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A coming-of-age story set against the waning years of the USSR, Goodbye Soviet Union is a nostalgic and heartfelt invocation of a unique time and place. Likely to be a hit in both Estonia and Finland (tickets were sold out for the public screening here in Tallinn), it breathes new life into the teen indie drama.

Johannes (Niklas Kouzmitchev) and his family are Ingrian Finns. Neither Russian or Estonian, they occupy a strange place in the multicultural patchwork of the ESSR. His mother (Nika Savolainen) never reveals the identity of Johannes’ father, leaving them to put none other than Lenin as the father. Johannes Leninovitch grows up with his parents in the closed city of Leningrad 3, an idealised Soviet space hiding a secret radiation facility. But they are kicked out and sent to Tallinn after a dangerous accident.

If Leningrad 3 felt like a remnant of the 50s, Tallinn in the 1980s is a land full of paradoxes, best expressed by Johannes’ beloved Lenin statues being defaced by punks wearing Kino jackets. This is a marked contrast with the earlier sweetness of Johannes playing with Gena the crocodile, an iconic figure of animation, whom he calls his best friend. After his Gena doll is destroyed, he becomes friends with a young Chechen with the same name and falls in love with his sister Vera (Elene Baratashvili). Together he must navigate between his new-found love and desire to discover the freedom of the West.

The drab colours one may associate with Western depictions of the Soviet Union are replaced by a bright and expressive ’80s palette: from the deep blue pioneer school uniforms to the yellow of a Gorbachev doll’s sweater. The soundtrack, a mixture of 80s Estonian punk like “Tere Perestroika”, the Soviet National anthem played on a music box, and Russian pop songs like Anne Veski’s “Love Island”, truly immerses you into the era, giving the film that authentic coming-of-age feel.

This is a deeply personal story from debut Finnish director Lauri Randla. Born in Estonia in 1981 before taking the boat to Helsinki, he revisits his youth with great tenderness. The use of voiceover gives the film an intimate feel, as if he is simply recounting this story in person. But this sense of nostalgia doesn’t cloak the difficulties of the time nor the importance of freedom for all people.

Eventually, Randla places love over any sense of country, Johannes boldly stating that with love, all you need in life is the air you breathe. With shades of youth classics like Submarine (2010) and Lady Bird (2017)— also contrasting bold children against a place they want to escape — Goodbye Soviet Union ups the stakes by situating this mostly comic genre within a dying republic and focusing on a marginalised ethnic group rarely seen in contemporary cinema. The Soviet Union might be on the way out, but the lessons learned are truly universal. Hopefully it sees the same recognition as the dozens of American and British bildungsromane we see every year.

Goodbye Soviet Union plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Space Dogs

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

For mankind to see if it could survive the perils of space exploration, it tested one of its first flights on a dog named Laika. She made it into space but was incinerated upon re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. This is depicted in Space Dogs with a 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) inspired level of wonder; both in its epic range and its psychedelic play of sound and colours. Yet this violent and strange beginning is only a harbinger of what’s to come: a very weird deep dive into man’s worst tendencies to man’s best friend.

This is unlike any documentary I have ever seen. Part obtuse-Angela Schanelec movie, part Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979), part Aleksey German Jr’s Under Electric Clouds (2015), it’s a fragmented, overly repetitive and narratively angular depiction of stray dogs living in Moscow intercut up with an essayistic exploration of the Soviet Space program. While not everything works — some scenes are simply too long to keep us engaged — duo Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter deserve credit for the boldness of their vision and the steadfastness of their execution.

Space Dogs

By far their biggest score is the narration by Russian veteran Aleksey Serebryakov — best known for McMafia (Hossein Amini and James Watkins, 2018-) and Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014) — whose unmistakable timbre lends the film a certain authority and tragic inevitability. He recounts the legend that Laika didn’t permanently disappear but actually returned to the streets of Moscow as a ghost. Our hero in this “documentary” is also a Laika— who either is the Laika herself, a descendent of the Space Program dogs, or another dog entirely — who endlessly roams the wide avenues of Russia’s capital, finding little respite from man’s eternal cruelness.

Space Dogs often films these animals from the ground, allowing us to imagine life from their perspective. In comparison, the momentous tower blocks and orange-tinged sky of a relatively unpeopled Moscow — filmed in the dusk and dawn — creates a sense of unreality and oppression that the main Laika and its roaming gang of companions simply cannot escape. Like the best of Soviet science fiction, the concept of space travel and exploration is something of an Escher’s staircase, looping back to humanity itself, and its own seemingly unsurmountable issues.

The film debuted at the festival with a very apt content warning. If you are in anyway an animal lover, Space Dogs is a relentlessly difficult watch. Yet I felt that its very dedication to exposing man’s absolute cruelty to his kindest animals achieves a bizarre kind of moral. It’s closest comparison might actually be White Bim Black Ear (Stanislav Rostotsky, 1977), a Soviet doggy-centric take on Au Hazard Balthasar (Robert Bresson, 1966) that is even more heartrending due to its manipulation of the audience’s hopes and dreams. Yet it shares a similar theme in showing how we treat dogs — ostensible big balls of kindness — reflects back on us as a society. After all, if we cannot be kind to man’s best friend, how are we ever going to be kind to one another?

Space Dogs prompted many walkouts in my screening, meaning it may be a hard sell for distributors. Deckert Distribution have the rights, and may try have some success in the arthouse circuit.

Available on Mubi is September.