[home]   [current reviews]   [review archive]  [ukey say...]   [retrospectives]
[links]   [frequently asked questions]   [e-mail]

  
Russian Ark

*

Cinema Reviews - Week of April 25, 2003

Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate U. Russia. 96 minutes. Directed by Alexander Sokurov. Written by Boris Khaimsky, Anatoli Nikiforov, Svetlana Proskurina, Alexander Sokurov. Starring Sergei Dreiden, Mariya Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy, David Giorgobiani, Alexander Chaban, Maksim Sergeyev.

"Russian Ark" is less like watching paint dry than like watching it sit on the wall and stay wet. A lot of expertise has gone into making a movie that is the same thing for an hour and a half -- the same boring, posing, meandering journey of weirdness, impossible to follow or stand. It doesn't change. It doesn't develop. It makes little effort to arouse the audience or communicate its content. There are those who call it an amazing technical achievement, and they are correct. But the movie is also extraordinarily boring. Go see it if you want an insight into how it must feel to be a teacher with nothing to do except pace up and down an exam room, waiting for the mean old clock to move its hands.

The movie is a subjective camera piece without cuts. Alexander Sokurov, the director, and Tilman Buttner, the cinematographer, used a high-definition 24-frames-per-second digital camcorder to film an unbroken point-of-view shot that lasts for 96 minutes. Movies like "The Player" and "Touch of Evil" began with takes that ran for several minutes, and Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" was edited to look like it was unedited, but "Russian Ark" is the first theatrical feature film made up of only one take.

It's a great piece of choreography. Two thousand performers fill the screen as the camera makes swift movements through hallways, staircases, exteriors and more than thirty rooms in and around St. Petersburg's Hermitage. All the actors and extras seem to make their cues just fine, be they walking, tip-toeing, marching or dancing around the museum's exhibits. But so what? To call "Russian Ark" well made would be an understatement. It is also ostentatiously European, filled with empty cultural references, completely random in its dialogue and story and impenetrable in its aura.

The film is told from the viewpoint of an unidentified guy who stands behind the camera, asking every few minutes whether he's having a dream or not. The soundtrack is so strange that although there are supposed to be some moments when we're hearing his thoughts and others where he is speaking, I could never be sure which was which. The narrator is guided through the Hermitage by a man in a tight black suit who dances around in front of the camera. He's a former French aristocrat from centuries ago -- at least, he thinks he is, but he doesn't know exactly what time he lived in and he expresses surprise at the fact that fluent Russian is coming out of his mouth. Confusingly to the narrator (and frustratingly to us), the man in the black suit speaks thoughts that trail off into nowhere, and sometimes do not seem to make sense in themselves.

On and on, as the mumbling voice follows the black-suited ghost man on his hop-skipping through the galleries. There is a kid who stands around to get shouted at by the aristocrat, a woman who makes bird sounds to paintings so she can, um, express herself, and everyone's talking over each other at varying volumes and levels of echo, while folks from various diverse times and cultures swan in and out arbitrarily.

I don't ask that movies always make logical sense, but they can't piss about this much and expect to be praised as dreamlike. After the novelty of "Russian Ark" has sunk in, we're left to watch a journey without dream logic or an atmosphere of conviction. It's alienating, affectedly artsy and insufferable. When I saw it last September, at least half of the audience walked out of the auditorium before the first half of the running time was over. This is one of those movies where you look at your watch and become convinced that it must be lying.

Or maybe not. Maybe this is one of those movies where you either latch on all the way, or can't relate at all. Maybe you'll be so interested in the concept and bowled over by its realisation that you will fall in love. Me, I think "Russian Ark" is a lot easier to admire when we're not actually sitting there watching it.

COPYRIGHT© 2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani

2003 Reviews (alphabetical)
2003 Reviews (by star rating)
Archive of all cinema reviews (alphabetical)
Review Archive Index

UK Critic main page