Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s debut feature has all the hallmarks of a cult classic. It was originally banned by the Russian authorities who demanded that 40 minutes be cut from the film before they would allow its showing.
As luck would have it, the international film community got a hold of the film and after it won prestigious awards the Russian authorities relented.
It received a limited release in specified theatres in Moscow and St. Petersburg only. The film cost about $800,000, a bargain by any standards. Although it took 73 days to shoot the production lasted over fours years as the money repeatedly ran out.
The film is harsh and grating at times but it has a mysterious foreboding about it that is reminiscent of “Blair Witch Project” with a David Lynch edge.
Ostensibly about the evils of cloning, director Khrzhanovsky says the film is more about the evils of a robotized human race than about genetic engineering per se’.
The overall plot of the film came from an actual meeting of the director, his friend and a prostitute in a late-night city bar. Khrzhanovsky and his friend, who knew the real profession of the prostitute, made up fake stories about who they were and what they did. Their false professions were that of a cloning scientist working on secret projects and a government operative. The girl made up her false identity about being a sales manager.
Some time later Khrzhanovsky thought about that night and formed a story of cloning experiments hidden for years in the isolated slums of suburban Moscow. He took the idea to author Vladimir Sorokin, one of the most famous Russian post-modern authors (in 2001 Sorokin received both the National Booker Award and the Award of Andrey Beliy for outstanding contributions to Russian literature).
To his amazement Sorokin agreed to write a screenplay based on the story. The end result is a surrealistic trip through an industrial wasteland of wild dogs, dark, muddy streets and discarded, faceless remnants of humanity. The forgotten results of failed social experiments, they are left to make with heads molded of chewed bread and live semi-conscious lives under the influence of poisonous moonshine.
The film starts with a recreation of that fateful night of the meeting of the two men and the girl. They make up their stories and go their separate ways.
The girl makes her way through the polluted and toxic mud of the industrial suburbs to the land of the forgotten, occupied by clones of the oldest experiments dating back to the post-war USSR.
The girl is one of four, her sister has died and she will take part in the wake, an extended drunken misery in which we become a part of the failure of society. One of the men is arrested for his failure and lack of discipline and sent off to war. The other continues his real job as a meat salesman and is obsessed with a new brand of round pig. He didn’t even know they existed and now they are everywhere, frozen in lockers for years.
An endless supply of round pigs, succulent to the taste.
After death of the girl’s sister, the hags have no one to shape the heads of the dolls from the soft bread the women chew into a clay-like mass. They try to make a mold but the dolls don’t look right.
They are all the same now, without the hand of the one women who could bring them to life. The dolls are a failure and the women rant in their drunken delusion.
With its darkness and hidden thoughts this film reflects David Lynch’s creepy and mystical wanderings through the miasma of the collective unconscious of the guilty and fearful.
There is a link as well (inadvertent?) to Soderburgh’s recent “Bubble” about the sudden cracking of the social fabric in a doll factory in West Virginia and, of course, the kinship to the original “Frankenstein” cautionary legend of the human creation of life.
The cinematography is basic 35mm in color, much hand-held, and recreates the feeling of the dark underground in last year’s “Kontroll,” (Hungarian--Nimród Antal).
This is not an easy film to watch, with its seemingly endless writhing and wringing. But it is worth the effort and gives food for thought after the viewing, something all too rare these days.
In Russian w/English subtitles
Your Talkback on this Story