Sergei Ursulyak’s film “Liquidation” was called a hit and the new “Meeting Place” before the premiere: that’s what they said on TV. As for it being a hit, that wasn’t a problem: on election night, the people were simply destined to change channels to watch Odessa in 1946, to avoid looking at the nasty mugs of the political “elite”. But it would be hard to say that it measures up to “Meeting Place”, the 70s spy miniseries set after WWII that is one of the classics of Soviet television. Calling “Liquidation” the new “Meeting Place” is the same as calling Marshal Zhukov Menshov instead of Mikhail Ulyanov. The result is predicable: on screen, Menshov seems mainly concerned about whether he can stick out his jaw better than his predecessor. Menshov is a counterfeit Ulyanov, just as “Liquidation” is a counterfeit “Meeting Place”. It’s not enough to set the action after the war and copy a few scenes to make these characters played by Mashkov and Makovetsky just as much a part of folklore as the characters of Zheglov and Sharapov. It’s amusing that the key point of all the reports and “news” items about the series was how well the actors studied the Odessa dialect. They really over did it: I can’t imagine anything more unconvincing and false than the way they talk. On the other hand, what can the creators and advertisers of the film think about it if they consider its main virtue to be the way the actors mangle their words. But “Liquidation” is the least annoying example of the phenomena of counterfeit productions that predominates on television. As banal as this may sound, this mainly concerns counterfeit productions about Soviet “counterespionage”. Did western human rights advocates in Soviet times doubt the justice of elections to the Supreme Council of the USSR? No, they didn’t, because they knew they were not elections. The regime today wants the same results that were achieved in the Supreme Council, but at the same time they want praise from human rights organizations. And so we have an extremely long news report, parodying the language of Soviet commentators, on western observers’ complaints about the events of 2 December. It turns out that they are all based on just one video recording of a dumping of election bulletins at a polling booth in the city of X. They explain to viewers at great length that it was not a dumping, it was… Anyway, I didn’t manage to work out what it was, but that’s not the point. Not only the Internet and independent newspapers, but also official statements, for example by “Just Russia”, are full of hundreds and thousands of facts of blatant manipulation, intimidation and illegal campaigning. But the TV explains that it all comes down to one video recording. Guys, decided what you want: 99.99% or a kiss from Europe. You can’t get both at once, this is impossible by definition. The inability to decide means the result is counterfeit propaganda: Soviet propaganda always knew what it wanted. And especially, it would never allow such rubbish which the very special correspondent Arkady Mamontov came up with, when he showed his recent film about the “quiet Americans” who are preparing an “orange revolution” in Russia. Listen to this, he says, this is a recording of a telephone conversation between two leaders of the “disagreement” group and a person who gives money to people taking part in the march. My dear boy, I can give you hundreds of conversations like this between unidentified people? Where are the names, the passwords, the addresses? And what are these sexual fantasies that are quite inappropriate in the fight for the future of Russia: a delicate girl goes up to an OMON officer and says: “Hit me”. Are you by any chance a sado-masochist? The OMON officer evidently tells her: “Go away, you nasty girl?” And what is this brigade of grandmothers who instruct the “disagreement group”? Has he been watching the paranoid thriller “The Case of Lance-Corporal Kochetkov” (1955), where a quiet old lady turns out to be a spy for the CIA? They didn’t even show it on TV under Brezhnev: it was beneath their dignity.
AFTER LIFE Russia, 2007 Directed by Oleg Osipov. Starring Alexei Maklakov, Yevgeny Sidikhin, Said Bagov. Judging from the reviews, this is a New Russian criminal absurdist film with bankers, killers and even the third dimension. From 17 January.
ALIENS VERSUS PREDATOR: REQUIEM USA, 2007 Directed by Colin and Greg Strause. Starring John Ortiz, Steven Pasquale. You’d think it would be difficult to imagine anything more monstrous than “Alien Versus Predator”. Little did we know… From 10 January.
ASTERIX AT THE OLYMPIC GAMES France, 2007. Directed by Frederic Forestier. Starring Clovis Cornillac, Gerard Depardieu, Alain Delon. Evidently things aren’t going very well for our poor old Alain Delon. One day he’s sells off his art collection, and the next he appears in “Asterix”. From 31 January
ATONEMENT USA, 2007. Directed by Joe Wright. Starring Kira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saorsie Ronan. A Victorian girl with an overactive imagination accuses the servant’s son of raping her sister. From 17 January.
THE BEST FILM Russia, 2007 Directed by Kirill Kuzin. Starring Garik Kharlamov, Pavel Volya. The so-called comedians from “Comedy Club” parody every film genre going. From 24 January.
THE DARJEELING LIMITED USA, 2007. Directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Owen Wilson, Adrian Brodey, Natalie Portman. After their father’s death, three brothers don’t waste time in mourning, and go to India to look for a leopard which their father has transformed into. From 24 January.
THE EYE USA, 2007. Directed by David Moreau, Xavier Palud. Starring Jessica Alba, Parker Posey. A remake of the Oriental horror film. From 31 January.
THE GOLDEN DOOR France, 2007. Directed by Emanuele Crialese. Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vincenzo Amato, Aurora Quatrrocchi. A widower trying to flee to the USA in the early 20th century meets a girl “from his past”. From 31 January.
HIS MAJESTY MINOR France, 2007 Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Starring Vincent Cassel, Jose Garcia. A mythical comedy where a mute orphan, half-man half-beast, meets the great Satyre. From 10 January.
THE HUNTING PARTY USA, 2007 Directed by Richard Shepard. Starring Richard Gere, Terrence Howard. A journalist who disappeared during the war in Yugoslavia returns to put his colleagues on the track of a war criminal who has gone into hiding. From 3 January.
I’M A CYBORG, BUT THAT’S OK South Korea, 2007 Directed by Chan-wook Park. Starring Su-jeong Lim, Hie-jin Choi. Love in a mental institution. She thinks she’s a cyborg. He steals brains. But that’s OK! From 17 January
IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH USA, 2007 Directed by Paul Haggis. Starring Tommy Lee Jones. Charlize Therzon, Susan Sarandon. Haggis (“Crash”) continues his chronicle of the latent civil war in the US. A Vietnam veteran looks for his son who vanishes shortly after returning from Iraq. From 24 January.
MICHAEL CLAYTON USA, 2007. Directed by Tony Gilroy. Starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton. A New York lawyer known by his colleagues as the “fixer” finds his life turning into a nightmare. From 17 January.
MIGUEL AND WILLIAM Spain, 2007 Directed by Ines Paris. Starring Elena Anaya, Juan Luis Galiardo, Geraldine Chaplin. It turns out that Shakespeare and Cervantes were not only good friends, they also shared the same girl. From 17 January.
OPEN SPACE Russia, 2007 Directed by Denis Neimand. Starring Andrei Chadov, Anna Slyu. Three drug addicts are abandoned in the taiga with a strange hunger. Not a film about drugs as such, but about drugs as a means of war and manipulation. From 24 January.
RAMBO IV USA, 2007. Directed by Sylvester Stallone. Starring Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Sam Elliott. To be quite honest, we weren’t expecting another sequel. It looks like Sylvester should see a psychologist who can gently tell him that he’s not Rocky or Rambo. From 24 January.
REDACTED USA, 2007 Directed by Brian de Palma. Starring Francois Caillaud, Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney. De Palma has already made a film about the rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl in “Casualties of War”. The same thing is happening in Iraq, if not worse. From 24 January.
TO EACH HIS CINEMA 2007 Directed by Joel Coen, Takeshi Kitano, Roman Polansky et al. Starring Takeshi Kitano, Michelle Piccoli, Silvia Crystal, Janna Moreau et al. At the request of the Cannes Festival, 33 directors present a short film about cinema. From 10 January.
VEXILLE Japan, 2007. Directed by Fumihiko Sori. Animation about a female super agent investigating futuristic corporations manufacturing forbidden cyber-technology. From 10 January.
WE OWN THE NIGHT USA, 2007 Directed by James Gray. Starring Joachin Phoenix, Mark Walberg. The Russian mafia has really got carried away this time, and publishes the lists of cops sentenced to death. It’s a good thing the cops have relatives to protect them. From 6 December.
WHEN A MAN FALLS IN THE FOREST Germany, 2007 Directed by Ryan Esligner. Starring Timothy Hutton, Sharon Stone. In the style that is fashionable at the moment, several strange lives are intertwined. A night watchman listens to the opera and dreams. A businessman sleeps at work. His wife is a kleptomaniac. From 24 January.
WHISPER USA, 2007 Director Stewart Hendler. Starring Josh Holloway, Blake Woodruff, Joel Edgerton. A kidnapper gets more than he bargained for when the boy he kidnaps turns out to have paranormal powers. From 17 January.
TISKI (VICE)
Russia, 2007
Directed by Valery Todorovsky
Starring Maxim Matveev, Fyodor Bondarchuk, Alexei Serebryakov
**
First reaction: what the hell did I just watch? It’s impossible to understand the main character. He’s a DJ, and not just any DJ, but the star of Rostov-on-Don, who already has a lot of things he wants in life, but stupidly gets involved with selling stolen pills: OK, to start with we have to believe that there are DJs out there who know nothing about drugs. But he is charmed by the drug baron Verner, who gives him a club and throws his sister in for good measure. But as soon as the sweaty Dudaitis, a psychopathic cop who has switched from heroin to vodka, the DJ hands Verner over to him. What is this, a gay love triangle? The fight between the naked Verner and the clothed cop gives you this impression, but it’s probably just my sick imagination. Who is this DJ, a man without qualities or something? Alas, it is not the DJ who lacks qualities, but the film, which looks very good in parts, and well acted by Bondarchuk and Serebryakov (you’d hardly expect them to act badly). It’s not a semi-document intentionally lacking commentary: it’s too “artistic” for that. It’s just a film that is scared of defining itself, and ashamed of the money from the Drug Control Agency, and earns it by shots of children shooting up and other horrors. Although the DCA are made to look bad: the cop Dudaitis is one of the most loathsome creatures seen on the Russian screen in a long time.
FAY GRIM
USA, 2007
Directed by Hal Hartley
Starring Parker Posey, Megan Gay
****
A sort of sequel to “Henry Fool” – the story of a sexually obsessed writer who stirs up trouble in the sleepy town he settles in. “Sort of” because Hartley, the most timid of the American indie filmmakers, doesn’t worry about psychology and logic, and can send his characters to the moon without looking like a pompous idiot. Fool, whose abandoned wife is looking for him, turns out to be a CIA agent who has left traces all over the world. Spies from all possible agencies dance around her, kill each other and die. Meanwhile, Fool drinks whiskey in the cellar of the number one terrorist, and mocks him: you were just a nobody and screwed donkeys until I picked you out. The amusing and tender Hartley has said everything that he things about the state of mankind in such a way that he has blown away honest liberals who are attached to reality. His world is lopsided, but no one notices this. It is a circus featuring very beautiful women, paranoid terrorists and talkative guys whose penises have been replaced with pistols. And the show that is performed at this circus every evening is called “Apocalypse”
GLYANETS (GLOSS)
Russia, 2007
Directed by Yulia Vysotskaya, Alexei Serebryakov, Alexander Domogarov
*
This isn’t a film, it’s a catastrophe, without skill satire or characters: the only qualities of Konchalovsky that remain are a nasty, bilious misanthropy, hatred for the country and its people, an unconcealed voyeurism (and I suppose the desire to film Yulia Vysotskaya, which for some reason no one else shares). Only voyeurism can explain the fact that the action is set in the world of the modeling business and “elite” prostitution, or rather whoring: this allows the camera to feel buttocks of girls from the stable of the pimp Listerman, played by Listerman himself. It is particularly nauseating that to make him sympathetic, the pimp has cancer. We have Serebryakov in a kilt, the editor of a glossy magazine, who is given a pedicure at an office meeting. An oligarch who slits his wrists with the wire “rosette” of a champagne bottle. Vysotskaya as Cinderella, crawling on all fours in a torn skirt. No, of course it is not important what is filmed, but how it is filmed, but it is this “how” that makes you want to go and wash your hands after watching the film.
12
Russia, 2007
Directed by Nikita Mikhalkov
Starring Nikita Mikhalkov, Sergei Garmash, Mikhail Efremov, Sergei Makovetsky
*
A fable: a jury headed by an ambivalent foreman (for some reason one recalls “The Suicide Club”) finds a Chechen boy not guilty for the murder of his adoptive father, an officer in the special forces. Unlike many people, I don’t condemn “12” for the cult of the special services, although Mikhalkov’s character is a Chekist who believes that it is best for people to live behind bars. But here the special services are a synonym for the gay mafia. When the foreman strokes the boys head and says, you used to live with uncle Vova, but now you’ll live with me, the blatant pedophilia makes you want to be sick. But the creative insignificance of this film is worse than any ideology. In making a remake of Sydney Lumet’s classic “12 Angry Men”, Mikhalkov for some reason destroys the claustrophobic structure and thus deprives the film of meaning. Assuming the role of defender of the lands of Russia, he does not know basic facts: in Russia the verdict of a jury is passed by a simple majority of votes, and not unanimously, and the jury cannot only consist of men, and rich men at that. He gathers a group of famous actors only to put caricature masks on them: a stereotypical Jew, Georgian, anti-Semite etc., and gives each one of them a special number to perform: it’s like a collection of skits. Sergei Gazarov even dances with a knife between his teeth. Only Mikhail Efremov and Sergei Garmash keep their dignity as actors, but the director does nothing to help them. Another thing: I’d really like to know whose severed hand with a diamond ring on it is carried by the dog in his mouth in the finale.
BEOWULF
USA, 2007
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Starring Ray Winston, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins
**
A film based on the Anglo-Saxon epic about a wandering adventurer who kills a monster and inherits the throne of the country he saves, but falls to the charms of the Mother of Evil. Zemeckis does his job well: it’s a decent cartoon. It’s even fun to guess who the actor is who plays the demon under a layer of slime. It’s also obvious why Jolie’s breasts and lips were computer-enhanced: her tits have to balance her enormous tail, otherwise she’ll fall on her back. What is more interesting is trying to understand why the script was written by people who are far from being the worst American culture has to offer: Roger Avery, the author of the film “Killing Zoe”, and Neil Gaiman, the author of the great novel “American Gods”. To avoid boredom, you can look for other interpretations of the action: for example, it’s logical to assume that the demon breaks into the castle and tears Vikings to pieces not because it is the devil incarnate, but because the rowdy shouts and songs coming from the banquet hall have given it insomnia.
EASTERN PROMISES
USA, 2007
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel
***
The “simpler” Cronenberg is, the closer he gets to “reality”, the more complex and fantastic he becomes. In “Eastern Promises” you also expect him to reach the limit where reality becomes ambiguous, but without becoming pure fantasy, as was the case in “A History of Violence”. But the story he tells seems to be sufficient in itself. A London nurse with Russian roots accidentally gets involved with the Russian mafia. There’s nothing commercial about it, but for Cronenberg this is not enough. The plot revolves around a child who was born to an underage prostitute. Everything works out for the child: oh well, thank heavens for that. Even the impotence of the “godfather’s” son does not rise to the level of metaphor – like it did in “Cargo 200” – and remains nothing more than impotence.
ZHESTOKOST (CRUELTY)
Russia, 2007
Directed by Marina Lyubakova
Starring Anna Begunova, Renata Litvinova
***
The feature film debut by this documentary filmmaker, who among other things made a film about Pyotr Mamonov. A refreshingly nasty girl who “hasn’t decided if she’s a boy or a girl” takes photographs of a guy having an affair and then tries to blackmail him. Not succeeding in this, she involves his abandoned mistress (an uncharacteristic Litvinova) in an orgy of destruction, taking away the man’s car, dacha and job. The film references “Thelma and Louise”, but doesn’t hide this similarity – i.e. it doesn’t steal anything. And it doesn’t try to make the girl sympathetic: she’s just a little bitch. There are really only two flaws. The finale gives us more explanations than we need, and the title “Cruelty” also belongs to a very good old Soviet film.