31 Days of Hell: Mister Designer (1987) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Lenfilm

Russian film director Oleg Teptsov tragically only ever had two films to his name before forfeiting the director’s chair and retreating from the film business altogether.  After the failure of his second feature The Initiated made in 1989, Teptsov hung his hat and never directed feature films again.  A real shame because his debut picture, the 1987 surreal psychological thriller Господин оформитель or Mister Designer is a color saturated phantasmagoria of period gothic horror with brilliant editing, cinematography and an understated central performance from the film’s mercurial “hero”, if you can call him such. 

Based on the short story The Grey Automobile by renowned novelist Alexander Grin, Mister Designer follows disgraced formerly renowned artist and designer Platon Andreyevich (Viktor Avilov) who is still reeling from a botched art project from six years prior, wallowing in depression yet arrogant about his artistic mastery as ever.  Nursing a morphine addiction, he accepts a job from a wealthy socialite named Mr. Grilliot (Mikhail Kozakov) who wants Platon to fully furnish, design and decorate his mansion. 
 
Upon his arrival at the millionaire’s home, he discovers it was actually the man’s wife Maria (Anna Demyanenko) who hired him and upon meeting her firsthand he becomes convinced she was the same person who once did underage nude modeling for him.  But as the picture presses on, both Platon and the audience begin losing track of what’s real or imagined with hints dropped that Maria might actually be a spirit haunting the premises.

 

Rather than provide any clear revelations, the film instead dives deep into dreamlike imagery with frequent passages in slow motion and extended sequences of near silence that are driven almost entirely by the eerily beautiful visuals.  From start to finish, with an elongated title sequence of a music box that seems slightly off key, something is amiss in the lavish netherworld that is Mister Designer.  Opening on an abstract minimalist play with eerie cloaked figures in red and white against a black background, you could turn down the sound and feel unnerved just by the spooky vistas unfolding onscreen.
 
Visually Mister Designer is, to put it mildly, breathtakingly beautiful.  Lensed by renowned cinematographer Anatoly Lapshov in 1.33:1, the color drenched foray into kaleidoscopic cinematic madness presents such eye popping yet carefully composed and precise vistas of the interior decorum of the mansion and the period setting you’re reminded of the works of the great Italian horror maestro Dario Argento.  So strikingly visual is Mister Designer you could watch it in silence and still feel your hairs standing on end with rich colors that glisten and pop off the screen.

Then there’s the film’s completely jarring and anachronistic musical component provided by Sergei Kuryokhin, best known for his work as the keyboardist in the Russian rock band Aquarium, which comes in like a future-noir cyberpunk sonic beast invading what is ostensibly a period piece.  Take for instance a key sequence involving a life-changing game of cards between the main character and his wealthy employer, initially opening on a synthesized orchestral string sound before stark synthetic guitar abrasions strum their way onto the soundtrack. 
 
Later still is a montage that sounds a bit like Ricky Giovinazzo’s electronic score for Combat Shock, highly modern and deliberately at odds with the period setting.  In a way you could argue this technique of mixing two disparate periods together predated what Sofia Coppola would go on to do with Marie Antoinette, mixing modern pop tracks into a historical setting.  If nothing else the score makes the whole saga of Mister Designer seem more…contemporary?

Performance-wise, the film is a mixture of acting styles from period dialect and mannerisms to abstract theatrical performances comprised of purely physical movement often presented in slow motion.  A dialogue-free opening stage play with red and white cloaked figures moving about as the wind rustles and shakes their garments interspersed throughout the film with the more conventional sequences of characters interacting, the film is partially a straightforward narrative and a nebulous foray into madness, much of which is conveyed brilliantly by the film’s titular Mister Designer himself, Viktor Avilov.
 
Well-dressed and donning a long mane of hair with a piercing, penetrative gaze, Avilov makes the artist Platon into a mercurial, envious and potentially dangerous character whose interest in the commission project might have more to do with fixations on his employer’s wife rather than generating a work that will be ‘better than what God has made’.  Also terrific in the piece is Anna Demyanenko as the film’s cursed muse whom neither we or the film’s artiste “hero” are completely sure actually exists.  Lending equally strong support to the saga is Mikhail Kozakov as the film’s nebbish millionaire who doesn’t take too kindly to his hired hand’s flirtations with his wife.

Somewhere between straightforward horror and experimental student film with many, many slow-motion montages that don’t always come through clearly and leave much open to interpretation, Mister Designer went on to become a critical and cult favorite.  In the annals of Russian horror, the film stands out brightly among the rest as one of the most vibrant and visually striking films to ever come out of the country.  While not outright terrifying or drenched in the macabre like the 1992 Russian shocker The Touch, Mister Designer nevertheless from start to finish creates a mood of unease contextually and purely viscerally with images that, on their own terms, continue to haunt Russian and international filmgoers brave enough to tread its surreal and possibly supernatural grounds.

--Andrew Kotwicki