Dreams
and Comas
by
Chris Dashiell
History and culture as dream - that's the theme, and the
method, of Russian Ark, the latest film from visionary
director Alexander Sokurov. Placing us in the point of view of the narrator,
or dreamer, the camera glides through 33 rooms of the huge Hermitage
Museum in St. Petersburg, accompanied by a fussy 18th century French
Marquis, whose comments reflect the long love-hate relationship between
Russia and the civilization of Europe. The ghosts of the past seem to
live in the museum - we see Peter the Great beating one of his generals,
Catherine the Great in one of her less dignified moods, a military ceremony
at the court of Nicholas I, and a host of other odd tableaux and incidents,
not always in chronological order, seen through windows or doors for
a moment, like the furtive pantomime of ghosts.
It's all done in one take - the longest continuous shot
in motion picture history, a 96-minute tracking shot, no cuts, with
thousands of costumed extras, including a symphony orchestra - a feat
that it took Sokurov and his crew seven months to rehearse.
The
film's view of the past is sly, even subversive. Instead of the spectacle
that we find in historical epics, Russian Ark puts us in the
position of eavesdropper - everything is seen obliquely, through snatches
of conversation and glimpses of events as if from the backstage of a
show, with the caustic mutterings of the eccentric Frenchman, played
by Sergey Dreiden, lending a strange aura to our wanderings through
the museum.
The
Marquis de Custine (an actual, although obscure, historical figure)
acts as a kind of cranky superego or critical voice on our journey through
the realms of history and art. He never leaves a statement unchallenged,
and his fastidiousness extends so far as to get up close to the museum's
paintings and sniff at them. The dreamer/narrator (Sokurov himself)
often finds himself correcting the Marquis in a sullen undertone, and
in this way the film's central relationship resembles the uneasy wedding
of Slavic Russia with the enlightened West that began in the 18th century
and has caused a great deal of cultural turbulence ever since.
The
director, who is something of a mystic, wants to evoke both the transitory
nature of events and the eternal nature of the human as such. The film
gazes with both amusement and sadness on the pageantry and frivolity
of the old Russian aristocracy, doomed to destruction by the 1917 revolution.
A ballroom scene, with the camera threading through hundreds of beautifully
dressed courtiers dancing the mazurka, is nothing short of amazing.
Sokurov's method doesn't always make it easy for an audience, however.
The quieter, more ambiguous aspects of the journey require a viewer's
complete attention, just as the lack of cuts places one within the demands
of real time. (To even talk of scenes or sequences feels inadequate
in the face of the film's seamlessness.)
Strange and poignant, like a painting come uncannily alive,
Russian Ark is also something of a tribute to the art of filmmaking
itself. In its visual style and rhythms it is a dreamlike work of art,
asking us to be alert within the dream, so as to catch the fading music
of the past.
Pedro
Almodóvar became a popular and world-famous film director through
his edgy comedies that employed camp elements and themes of mixed-up
gender and sex roles, comedies like Law of Desire and Women
on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Underneath the farce, there
were always serious themes, but in recent years the Spanish director
has turned to making quieter films in which pain and sadness are more
prominent. Talk to Her, which won the Original Screenplay
Oscar, is in some ways the culmination of Almodóvar's quest to
merge his comic and tragic sensibilities into one.
The
story sounds typically outlandish - a travel writer falls in love with
a bullfighter, famous for being a female in a traditionally male profession.
Later he meets a male nurse who devotes his time to a coma patient,
a woman whom he loved from afar before she suffered a car accident.
This nurse seems to only be able to love women who are helpless - before
this he had spent his life taking care of his mother. The stories of
these people are interwoven, going back and forth in time, and Almodóvar
lends the material quietness and gravity.
There's
something very sad about the way the men in this movie are shut off
from connecting with women - the film's master stroke is the use of
coma as a metaphor for the cultural objectification and passivity of
women in the minds of men. The picture explores this theme with some
unusual stylistic turns and plot twists. At one point Almodóvar
concocts an hilarious silent film that graphically illustrates a man's
infantile relationship to his lover's body. The film's impish sense
of humor balances the serious emotional issues to great advantage.
I
haven't always taken to Almodóvar's films. Too often they slip
into caricature. I didn't care for his previous film, All
About My Mother, which I found too predictable and self-congratulatory.
And Talk to Her has its uneven spots as well - at times its depiction
of the nurse's intimacy with his beloved's helpless body comes queasily
close to voyeurism. Nevertheless, the picture is his most successful
in years, managing to be provocative, disturbing, funny, sensitive and
heart-wrenching all at once. As an exploration of the male psyche on
film, there's nothing quite like it.
©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
