It’s a very good bet Ukraine based Soviet/Russian filmmaker
Konstantin Lopushansky, when he was thinking about the next film in his own
sort of Apocalypse Tetralogy, sat down and watched Lars Von Trier’s 1984
watery orange/green neo-noir The Element of Crime on repeat. Judging from his previous two entries in his
unnamed quartet of post-apocalyptic science-fiction films Dead Man’s Letters
and A Visitor to a Museum, the filmmaker is less interested in
telling stories than he is in soaking you through your bones in thick
atmosphere with the film sort of wallowing along with its mercurial hero.
Deliberately mannered and paced slow burns
that aim to gradually work you into a particular feeling or headspace, the
former understudy of Andrei Tarkovsky’s third feature in the tetralogy Russian
Symphony continues with the precedent set by Letters and Museum while
offering up debatably the most overtly Pentecostal work in Lopushansky’s
loosely defined dystopia.
Viktor Mikhaylov (Ivan Mazaev), a self-proclaimed
intellectual spoken of the same breath as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, navigates through
the flooded, burning streets of Russia as anarchy reigns and former government officials
are subjugated to dastardly public humiliations. Wandering through the dimly lit brown
interiors of the remnants of the town (allegorical for a collapsing Soviet
Union), Viktor convinces himself the only real way to turn the order of the
world back towards progress is to rescue the remaining children left behind
from the flood and begins preaching the word.
Almost immediately, he’s laughed off if not dismissed outright as a
showy charlatan. During his seemingly
aimless sojourn through the flooded streets, we learn the military and
government are crumbling and dangerous vigilante mobs are forming, all the
while Mikhail Gorbachev skulks about the background as a janitor. Soon Viktor himself is cast under suspicion
despite his claims of wanting to do something good with his last years.
Somewhat snarky, meandering and eventually wallowing in
despair, this Lenfilm produced lightly darkly humorous entry in the tetralogy though
winning the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 35th Berlin
International Film Festival is considered by the director himself to be “the
soviet apocalypse of the dying empire”. While not naming names or movements directly, the allegory comes through loud and clear onscreen.
Written
and directed by Lopushansky, reunited with cinematographer Nikolai Pokoptsev
and given a brooding ambient score by Andrey Sigle (The Sun), Russian
Symphony is equal parts Old Testament Last Judgment type of Boschian
imagery and equal parts high theatrics where neither the viewer nor the protagonist
Viktor are completely sure of what’s real or imaginary. What it’s mostly remembered as is a slice of
Russian orthodoxy with a very minimal insight into the then post-Soviet religious
resurgence, making Russian Symphony something of a testament to that
transitional period.
The first film in the tetralogy to inject dark humor into
the proceedings, inviting you to laugh at the protagonist with the citizens and
survivors he encounters, Russian Symphony though followed by a fourth
picture The Ugly Swans is thought by many to be the true concluding
piece to the series thematically. Like the
others before it, Lopushansky’s work isn’t for everyone. Russian Symphony is dense, brooding,
nebulous and for some others aggravating.
But as a continuation of the themes and visual ideas the director was
working on in Dead Man’s Letters and A Visitor to a Museum it
absolutely treads in the same footsteps as those pictures. Less of a straightforward narrative than a
sojourn through a netherworld, Russian Symphony while not as strong as
the works that preceded it nevertheless remains an important entry in the
director’s filmography as a film that tried to bridge the history of the past
with the fiction of the future.
--Andrew Kotwicki
