For anyone whose primary reference point for Kazakhstan was Borat – all silly accents, techno beachwear, and a baking Middle Eastern sun, Friday’s screening at the Russian Film Festival would have presented a bit of a surprise. Set in the freezing, endlessly flat, monochrome scrubland of the late 60s Soviet state, Aleksei German MI’s Paper Soldier (main image), an award winner at the Venice Film Festival, is a retelling of the space race with a less than positive spin. Divisively received on its release in Russia – some people thought it was fabricating Russian history whilst others saw it as revealing the truth – the fictional film depicts the Sputnik mission in a personal and ambivalent light.
Yuri Gagarin, however, is only a peripheral figure as the film focuses around Daniel Pokrovsky, a doctor charged with looking after the health of cosmonauts on the Sputnik programme. When one of the young men dies, set on fire in the gravity chamber, he begins to question everything and is unable to equate the broad heroism of his mission with the disposability of human life it requires of him. He becomes almost an anti-hero as we see him womanising and continuing with the project, even as he comprehends its dangers, the strain of his obsession eventually overwhelming even him. We are left with the bleak sense that the State, the greater good, can obliterate everything that crosses its path: life, intellect, even love.
Melody for a Street Organ
The melancholy, even depressing nature of the film is shared by revered director Kira Muratova’s Melody for a Street Organ, a modern day fairytale turned nightmare, featuring two orphaned and homeless siblings, in which there is no greater good and everyone is out for themselves. Offering a more varied and sumptuous palette than the muted, chilly beauty of Paper Soldier and filmed on location in Ukraine with the snowy brightness and glossy, enticing appearance of a traditional Christmas film, the attractive cinematography belies the increasingly depressing situation the children find themselves in. Human nature is exposed at its worst as corrupt adults, conmen and thieving children take advantage of the children’s naivety which is such that we watch them wandering through a station, waving a 500 euro note in their hands, unaware of what it is.
Although thematically and stylistically very different, the two films share an unswervingly pessimistic view of humanity and occasional flashes of absurdity: the lone camel lounging in the outdoor shots of Paper Soldier or the rich wife in Melody for a Street Organ arriving at the supermarket on a sedan chair in full fairy-princess regalia are brief moments of light relief. Visiting the festival may not dispel all preconceptions about modern day Russia but it does offer a fantastic opportunity to capture a side of the country that we don’t often see, beyond the stand-offish foreign affairs and dodgy politics in the news.
