Nine years before Svetlana Baskova’s meme-able banned
Russian shock art horror film The Green Elephant reared its ugly (and
perhaps ungainly?) head among Eastern European moviegoers, an even more
artistically effective like-minded screen provocation emerged with the taboo
shattering banned Hussein Erkenov directed military training requiem 100 Days
Before the Command.
Co-written by Work
on Mistakes screenwriter Vladimir Kholodov and eventual The Rifleman of
the Voroshilov Regiment screenwriter and novelist Yuri Polyakov, the
nonlinear nondescript art film like The Green Elephant thereafter was a
rumination on the maltreatment of (and growing homoeroticism within) the
Russian military trainees effectively making the Gorky Film Studio production
banned by the authorities outright. It
wasn’t until 1994 with the Berlin International Film Festival after the
director smuggled a film print out of the country global moviegoers got to see
the hotly contested 100 Days Before the Command for themselves.
Co-starring Zerograd actor Armen Dzhigarkhanyan as a
military general, the near mute Tarkovskian exercise in slow burning cinema
slowly careening through the squalid living environments of Russian military
recruits going through the motions of training, living and washing up in an en
masse shower that surely raised the eyebrows of authorities. Wordless yet drenched in subtly choking
atmosphere, the film is exquisitely mannered and lensed despite having turned
its cameras on dilapidated ruin with human life foraging around in it.
Running just over an hour but encompassing a
vastness of human experience within Russian military camps, as told here,
becomes evocative and almost lyrical in audiovisual approach. Playing out less like a documentary and more
like an ethereal dream or waking nightmare of some sort, the distinctly Soviet
experimental drama’s closest antecedent is the aforementioned Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Mirror which also achieves a timelessness with regard to Russian
military history.
Enigmatic, definitely vaguely homoerotic with graphic full-frontal
male as well as female nudity including but not limited to the much-discussed
shower scene of the recruits sponge bathing each other, the characters few that
there are take on existential names such as Angel and Death giving the whole
endeavor a kind of magical realism or surrealism as it were. To the film’s credit most of if not all of
the cast sans Dzhigarkhanyan consists of real-life soldiers and a certain type
of neorealism is achieved with the non-actor casting.
The use of music here is akin to Andrei Tarkovsky
or more recently Tengiz Abuladze in terms of soft orchestral renderings amid a
bevy of preexisting classical choices.
The real star of this strange sleepwalking show is the film’s cameraman Vladislav
Menshikov who teamed up with director Hussein Erkenov two more times with Cold
and Don’t Shoot the Passengers, crafting a dreamy daylit netherworld
of sorts that feels real but could easily slip into another hazy rabbit hole.
Ostensibly the feature film debut of its director, Hussen
Erkenov’s 100 Days Before the Command was understandably buried from the
moment it first appeared with Soviet censors blocking the film completely from
being seen either within its country of origin or outside of it. Not until 1994 did its filmmaker sneak the
film out of Russia did audiences catch wind of this unusual yet painterly
military nightmare.
The kind of button pushing
boundary breaking filmmaker whose work continues to court the ire of Russian
censors to this day including but not limited to his banned 2014 film Ordered
to Forget, Hussein Erkenov though considered an outlaw in his own country
nevertheless delivered a subtly searing slice of military drama as pure
experiential cinema that’s as unforgettable as it is unclassifiable. While not all worldly cinephiles will take to
its nouvelle vague dialect and terse running time, others will find it a
fleeting if not somber odyssey through a side of the military rarely ever seen
on film.
--Andrew Kotwicki