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| Courtesy of Mosfilm |
The cinema of eventual Mosfilm chairman Karen Shakhnazarov
which began in the early 1980s with the musical comedies We Are Jazz and
Winter Evening in Gagra remains one of Russia’s most indelible and
fascinating bodies of film work yet produced in the country. After moving onto his coming-of-age classic Courier, the director further cemented his reputation as one of the Soviet Union’s most gifted satirists
with his surreal comedy Zerograd.
A film which played freely with
magical realism while subverting narrative conventions, Shakhnazarov was ready
to push the idea of what subversive, almost revisionist investigations of
Russian history on film should be. Existing
somewhere between Federico Fellini and Terry Gilliam with how his work dives
into a particular regional headspace frequently employing dream logic, Shakhnazarov’s
work is only now starting to receive recognition outside of its country of
origin as important examples of contemporary world cinema to learn from and
respect.
After Zerograd managed to garner international
attention for the then-young director, Shakhnazarov’s career kicked into high
gear with three pictures that not only would reinvent what we expect from his
output but also challenged the very notion of how to assess cinematic art irrespective
of where it originated. In other words,
Shakhnazarov’s work wasn’t merely addressing Russian filmgoers but had the
potential to make global viewers rethink how to absorb and digest a motion
picture. Currently more or less in
retirement, the director’s fulltime involvement in Mosfilm has ensured a
majority of his pictures received full 4K digital restorations and uploads to
their streaming channel on YouTube replete with English subtitles, presenting
world cinephiles with a rare opportunity.
Having generated many pictures up until 2017, the Movie
Sleuth zeroes in on three particular ones loosely forming a kind of trilogy of
absurdist social satire and anachronistic digestion of Russia’s past and present
ways of life: the English-language filmed The Assassin of the Tsar, the
Altmanesque Full Moon Day and the quasi-mockumentary spin on Anton
Chekhov’s Ward No. 6. Thematically
kindred, no two films are alike visually, sonically or in terms of editing,
going for a different intent and rhythm each.
Though years apart, this unique trio of pictures represents the People’s
Artist of Russia at his most critical of his country of origin while also
further revolutionizing the narrative structure of storytelling itself with the
director’s idiosyncratic audiovisual approach.
The Assassin of the Tsar (1991)
The first of the director’s strange and wonderful ward
movies tackling either Russian history or historical Russian literature, The
Assassin of the Tsar finds Timofyev (Malcolm McDowell) as a patient in an
insane asylum outside of Moscow suffering from a split personality disorder
where he claims to be Yakov Yurovsky, the man who assassinated Tsar Nicholas II
at the tail end of the nineteenth century.
Though laughed off initially as malarkey, the psychiatrist assigned to
his case Alexei Smirnov (Oleg Yankovsky) notices bodily injuries on Timofyev as
well as personal details divulged from the patient that can’t help but
corroborate his tale.
In an effort to try and dissuade Timofyev from his
conviction, the psychiatrist plays along by pretending to be Nicholas II but
the ruse spirals out of hand and we find ourselves transported with doctor and
patient back through time into the psyche of nineteenth century Russia where McDowell
and Yankovsky inhabit the roles of Assassin and Tsar. From here this inflexible identity crisis leaps
freely between past and present, sometimes with the two psychological profiles
intruding on one another as the doctor doubles down on his ill pursuit of truth
despite pleas from his colleagues that he ceases work on Timofyev’s case. Soon the mutual journeys inward of both men
(and the film) attempt to make sense of not only why Tsar Nicholas II was assassinated,
but why Yurovsky was chosen to do the dirty deed in the first place.
Near-absurdist and heightened with the film’s grip on
reality softening over the course of its running time, The Assassin of the
Tsar aside from prominently featuring a renowned British actor in the lead
role marks the writer-director’s first real attempt at a bilingual
production. Filmed entirely in both
Russian and English for domestic and international exhibition (though Mosfilm
uses the English release as the official version) and photographed largely
within a real psych ward by longtime right hand man Nikolay Nemolyaev, the film
has one foot firmly rooted in the snowbound Russian present while the other
rubs into the historic last days of the Russian Imperial Family. As it nears conclusion, our own understanding
on the official version of the events is hazy at best as it casually mixes fact
and fiction into an insane cocktail.
Co-written by Courier and Zerograd screenwriter
Aleksandr Borodyansky and aided by a subtle score co-written by Vladislav Shut
and John Altman, the look and feel of The Assassin of the Tsar,
particularly within the quarters of the psych ward is decaying if not a bit
drab. But when the film makes a quantum leap
into the past, Tsar takes on a brownish, almost soft-sepia tonality
helping audiences to identify which frame of mind we’re in. It is here that the film’s production
designers really flex their creative muscles, restoring the formerly destroyed
Ipatiev house where Nicholas II and his family met their end. Almost acute attention to detail is paid to
every nuance and crevice in the home, successfully recreating the nineteenth
century period as it existed in photograph as well as memory.
Much will be made of the presence of Malcolm McDowell in the
production who reportedly pretended to speak Russian for the Russian release
version with overdubbing in post but speaks his own lines in the English
release. McDowell, keen on the
production, rented an apartment for several months in Moscow and through the
shoot went through all four seasons of the year onscreen. Though his performance can be understated at
best, McDowell gives the picture a unique screen presence on the international stage
not felt since Sean Connery famously starred in Mikhail Kalatozov’s final
film. Almost upstaging him is Oleg
Yankovsky who makes the uneasy transformation between clean cut doctor and
bearded decorated Tsar Nicholas II who is tasked with many scenes where he projects
prowess and eventual admission of defeat looking down the end of a gun.
Initially planning an updated adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Ward
No. 6 before Italian co-financiers backed out, Shakhnazarov and co-writer
Borodyansky amassed enough material about psych wards to still make a film that
could find its own footing. Eventually the
idea of marrying the material to an investigation into the assassination of
Tsar Nicholas II mixing the past and present, real and imaginary came to
mind. Although it enjoyed a Cannes Film
Festival premiere as well as a Russian and British theatrical premiere, the
film only went straight to video in the US sometime in the mid-2000s and
McDowell’s brief foray into Russian cinema came and went without much
noise. Thanks to the efforts of Mosfilm’s
restoration department followed by a 4K upload onto their streaming channel, this
confounding yet fascinating leap into a key moment of Russia’s history through
the fractured prism of a split personality can now be seen in all of its varying
states of existential historical madness.
Full Moon Day (1998)
Sometime in between when Robert Altman
unveiled his Raymond Carver inspired anthological cross-cutting tapestry Short Cuts in 1993 before protégé Paul Thomas Anderson answered that film with Magnolia
in 1999, Karen Shakhnazarov decided to offer up ostensibly Russia’s take on
Altman’s distinctive segmented storytelling.
Broken apart into a series of disconnected vignettes involving nameless
characters played by an ensemble cast including but not limited to Anna Germ,
Vladimir Ilyin, The Rifleman of the Voroshilov Regiment actress Anna
Sinyakina, Day of the Full Moon or Full Moon Day carries on the
surreal past/present leaping tradition of the director’s earlier film The
Assassin of the Tsar while offering a broad snapshot of contemporary
Russian life in the abstract. Unlike the
aforementioned Altman and Anderson epics however, Full Moon Day is
fleeting and almost like the wind: implacable, nebulous and scattershot.
In this wildly experimental and
elliptical piece, no main character takes center stage and little to no
dialogue is spoken but we encounter a wide variety of historically significant people
including but not limited to Alexander Pushkin, Princess Olshanskaya, an
important diplomat, film directors and later still a murderer. Sequences last only a few minutes or so as
the cinematic floating feather drifts freely from scenario to scenario before
making giant leaps into the medieval period of swords, mesh armor and horseback
riding. Abandoning all sense of time,
viewers are treated to a kind of smorgasbord of Old Russia clashing with the
New while forming loose intrinsic links between both disparate eras where
everything has a place.
While boasting an ensemble cast
including working The Assassin of the Tsar actor Malcolm McDowell into a
glorified cameo, Full Moon Day is not interested n establishing
characters so much as it is having them bump into one another in Shakhnazarov’s
peculiar pinball machine. Taking the
impetus behind Zerograd with co-writer Borodyansky, the film makes a
spread-legged swan dive into a heady sphere where logic, reason and time simply
disappear in search of trying to get to the heart of what makes the modern
Russian people tick. Helping to usher in
this unique experimental vision is cinematographer Gennady Karyuk of Expiation
fame and longtime musical collaborator Anatoli Kroll of Winter Evening
in Gagra lends the seemingly disparate threads a charming soft irony. Still much of Full Moon Day gains its traction
from the checkered editing by Lidiya Milioti, finding a unique spotted rhythm
in how it cross-cuts from vignette to vignette.
A film that at once tries to process
the peculiarity of being Russian in an ever-evolving period while also firmly
planting itself alongside Altman and Anderson in its presentation of loosely
connected interlocking stories, Full Moon Day might be the director’s
most challenging if not uncommercial picture to date. While openly dealing in historical context
with fantastical magical realism, Full Moon Day is somewhat difficult to
gauge as an opaque cornucopia of Russia in the abstract. Though never boring, it lacks the compelling
narrative hook navigating viewers through this strange psychological historical
mosaic of the mind. Attempting to answer
what it means to be Russian in then-present 1998, Full Moon Day doesn’t
hit all the checkmarks but its fearlessness in smashing down conventions of
storytelling in Russian cinema must be admired on some level. Few directors, Russian or English, have this
kind of confidence in their work.
Ward No. 6 (2009)
Legendary Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s 1892 novella Ward
No. 6 was on writer-director Karen Shakhnazarov’s mind ever since 1988 when
pre-production on the first attempt at adapting the story to film resulted in The
Assassin of the Tsar instead. The story
of a psychiatric doctor who becomes a patient within his own asylum, the
director’s aforementioned Tsar while successful in its own right barely
scratched the surface of what the filmmaker really wanted to do with Chekhov’s
writing. Joining forces once again with
screenwriter Aleksandr Borodyansky and co-directed with the help of documentary
filmmaker Aleksandry Gornovsky, Karen Shakhnazarov’s deconstructive
transposition of Ward No. 6 to modern day Russia is perhaps closer to
the director’s own fixations and misgivings about life there than anything else
made by him up to this point.
Presented through the lens of a documentary film crew interviewing
patients within the ward’s quarters as well as friends and colleagues of the
doctor, Ward No. 6 zeroes in on Dr. Ragin (Vladimir Ilyin) overseeing
his hospital when he becomes obsessed with one of his patients, Gromov (Aleksey
Vertkov), who shares many of his philosophical views on life in Russia. Upon spending more time with Gromov, the clean-cut
and composed doctor gradually descends into existential depression and finds
himself becoming more unhinged with increasingly erratic and destructive
behavior, eventually becoming a patient to his colleagues within the very ward
with which he once ruled.
Much like the previous two pictures mentioned in this
article, Shakhnazarov’s interpretation of Anton Chekhov is psychological with
one foot in the real world and the other in dreamland. Playing like a docudrama replete with
innovative digital camerawork by Aleksandr Kuznetsov that shifts between high
and low definition throughout the largely handheld footage, Ward No. 6 deliberately
lacks the polished glossy finish of his earlier works instead feeling somewhat
like a filmed live theater play set within a real ward ala Peter Brooks’ interpretation
of Marat/Sade. Adding to the “realism”
is the neorealist use of real patients of the psycho-neurological boarding
school and one of the film’s most iconic laughs was completely unplanned and
spontaneously in the moment, making this arguably Shakhnazarov’s closest work to
that of John Cassavetes.
Prominently starring Burnt by the Sun actor Vladimir
Ilyin as the beleaguered doctor now looking out from behind bars, the actor gives
a pitch perfect performance of Ragin whose attire, appearance and demeanor
shifts over the course of the movie from presentable to disheveled and
chaotic. Brilliantly playing off him is
Alexey Vertkov as Gromov who brings to the role a kind of Terence Stamp
youthful wit and charisma. As Gromov
drones on endlessly at the doctor and brings him down to his level, the
question becomes whether or not the doctor is destined to sink beneath the man
who triggered this whole meltdown. Shakhnazarov
fans will also spot Winter Evening in Gagra actor Aleksandr
Pankratov-Chyornyy in a supporting role as the troubled doctor’s friend Mikhail
who unsuccessfully tries to bring the man back down to Earth with a ‘lost
weekend’ through Moscow including but not limited to a strip club.
A passion project for the Mosfilm chairman for decades
originally planned with legendary Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni in the
role of the doctor before falling apart, Ward No. 6 is at once a
breakdown of the fabric of Chekhov’s text as well as a further investigation
into the line dividing the sane and mad in contemporary Russian life. Partially a travelogue through the city of Moscow
showing off swanky shopping malls and nudie bars, partially a nose-dive into
the imprisoning walls of the ward dominated by the impoverished and
dispossessed, Shakhnazarov’s analysis and channeling of Chekhov is as much
about the author’s work as it is reflective upon the director’s own identity in
the film world.
Arguably the concluding piece of an unofficial trilogy of
films that try to capture the Russian spirit in microcosm tinged with elements
of the surreal and potentially insane, Ward No. 6 fully cements the
director’s status as one of the nation’s most important and idiosyncratic genre
defying filmmakers. Though one film of
the three doesn’t necessarily answer the questions posed by the other, they in
their way bring us closer into the headspace through which Karen Shakhnazarov
regards the world around him. Functioning
somewhat as history lessons while trying to project onto film the temperament
of the evolving Russian mind, this disparate yet kindred trilogy of films might
not show off the chameleonic auteur at his best (Zerograd may be the
pinnacle) but they most certainly represent Mosfilm’s very own Russian Doll at
his most introspective and transformative.
--Andrew Kotwicki
