Netflix Releasing: Silver Skates (2020) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Netflix

The story of Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates first appeared as an American novel by Mary Mapes Dodge first published in 1865, set in the Netherlands as a chronicle of 19^th century Dutch life.  A rags-to-riches tale of love, honor and ice skating, it told of a poor teenage boy named Hans Brinker and his sister Gretel trying to participate in the winter great ice-skating race on the canal while raising money for medical attention for their ailing father suffering from subdural hematoma.  Instead of participating in the race, Hans drops out to help a friend win while Gretel wins the girls’ race and the titular Silver Skates as the grand prize.  A popular work of Dutch fiction as well as cultural landmark, the novel was adapted for television including a musical by Sidney Lumet, two Disney films and an Australian animated feature.
 
Enter American born Russian filmmaker Michael Lockshin who was born in 1981 but moved to the Soviet Union with his family in 1986.  While in college, Lockshin began filming television commercials and music videos for about a decade which garnered numerous film awards internationally including a Russian beer commercial starring David Duchovny.  Known for his unique position in attracting international talent from the East as well as the West, Lockshin eventually mounted his first short film Afternoon Delight.  Right around this time, Netflix acquired and distributed the 2018 Russian biopic drama Dovlatov prompted by a limited theatrical release in the United States.  Shortly thereafter, in conjunction with co-screenwriter Roman Kantor, Lockshin began work on what became not only his first feature but the very first Russian film to be released on Netflix as a Netflix Original category title: a highly loose and anachronistic interpretation of Mary Mapes Dodge’s novel renamed The Silver Skates.
 
Moving the story from the Netherlands to Saint Petersburg, Russia roughly around the same time frame, this new re-imagined take on the story renames the hero Matvey Polyakov (Fedor Fedotov).  Depriving him of a sister, the titular Silver Skates are in this case bestowed to Matvey by his ailing lamplighter father Petr (Timofey Tribuntsev) for the purposes of working as a courier in the frozen Saint Petersburg canal marketplace.  However after showing up late to work one day after being delayed by the passage of the tsarist minister Nikolai Vyazemsky (Aleksei Guskov) and losing his position, Matvey seeks out a street pickpocketing Ice Gang led by Alexey Tarasov (Compartment No. 6 and Anora star Yuri Borisov) to try and raise the money for his father’s medical attention through any means necessary.
 
Meanwhile tsarist minister Nikolai’s daughter Alisa (Sonya Priss) goes against the grain pursuing scientific studies against her father’s wishes for her to marry Prince Arkady Trubetskoy (Kirill Zaytsev) an officer of the Guard Department.  While studying English via a British tutor installed on site, being forcibly wooed by the Prince with his own ulterior motive to secure an inheritance, the impoverished desperate Matvey and gang of pickpocketing thieves eventually land on the Vyazemsky estate grounds.  In a dare, Matvey scales Alisa’s balcony to inscribe graffiti on her wall but she catches him in the act forcing him to abruptly flee.  The next day, Matvey and the gang steal invitations to a ball on ice in the courtyard of Saint Michael’s Castle for more thievery but Matvey bumps into Alisa at the event who rather than expose him asks if he can pose as her father at the college entrance application in return. 
 
Taking aspects and framework of the plot and premise of Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates and running amok with it reimagining the whole thing as a romantic dramedy full of wild and stunningly choreographed skating sequences, Netflix’s Silver Skates or The Silver Skates is kind of a maximalist escapist fantasy.  On the one hand a sumptuous historical period document of life in the slums of Saint Petersburg mixing with royalty and the pickpocketing form of survival ala Bicycle Thieves, on the other hand a Sonja Henie exercise in romantic wintry ice-skating wonderment, think of this as In the Moscow Slums as a kind of Nutcracker on Ice special event.  Theatrical and heightened, it largely functions as a work of physical acting and stunt choreography with intensive training done by the actors and skaters months before the cameras rolled.
 
Attention to detail was vast and acute with a large warehouse utilized to create sets stationed on the Great Neva, skates designed off of historical models custom made for the film, real jewelry in some instances and many other period artifacts including furniture and costume design.  The film achieves some notoriety for filming on the frozen rivers and canals of bridges in Saint Petersburg with to date the largest amount of footage of the frozen canals shot for a single production.  Though the filming of scenes at the frozen Moyka River caused some pollution of the waters due to blue wooden painted bars used by the film crew, the production proceeded otherwise like clockwork with numerous scenes shot on real historical hotspots throughout Saint Petersburg.  The film does have a fair amount of CGI rendering but for the most part when you see those skaters performing astounding physical feats before the camera its very real.

 
From a purely visual end from the lush quality of the production, the film is exquisitely photographed and graded by Viking cinematographer Igor Grinyakin lensed digitally on the Arri Alexa in scope 2.35:1.  It looks crisp and painterly with a stark visual contrast established between the two worlds lived by the unlikely leads.  Given the director’s own multinational roots stemming between the East and West, Michael Lockshin hired British composer Guy Farley who recently contributed additional compositional work to the Netflix series The Crown.  A lot of it, recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, frankly sounds like Downton Abbey and its lighthearted theme though other times when it kicks into an action sequence it starts to sound like Hans Zimmer.  Otherwise the rest of the score largely consists of classical pieces including but not limited to Moonlight by Claude Debussy and even Tchaikovsky’s final waltz from The Nutcracker.

 
The two central leads, Fedor Fedotov and Sonya Priss, made their screen debuts here having never acted before.  Fedotov was an ice hockey player since infancy but nevertheless with everyone else underwent months of strict training to be able to perform their stunts on camera without the need for post-production CGI augmentation.  When you see skaters flip over or do multiple splits or spins, leaping over objects or drifting under bridges and through alleyways they’re not faking it.  The film ushers in the support of numerous renowned movie stars including the aforementioned Yuri Borisov, Plumbum or the Dangerous Game actor Aleksei Guskov as the minister Nikolai Vyazemsky, Game of Thrones actor Yuri Kololokolnikov, Irish Philomena actress Cathy Belton and last but not least legendary Leos Carax actor Denis Levant in a glorious cameo.

 
Released theatrically in February 2020 and premiering as the main event of the 42^nd Moscow International Film Festival where producer Nikita Mikhalkov presided over, the expensive super-production dominated the Russian box office for two weeks following a Netflix acquisition for international distribution.  Opening in fifth place on the platform among several Eastern European countries including Romania and Greece as well as ninth place in the United States, Silver Skates also became a major hit on Italian television as an Italian New Year’s Eve themed event and is regarded as one of the first times Russian Cinema became so popular in the country. 

 
Ostensibly a fairy tale tinged with aspects of the original text by Mary Mapes Dodge through the mold of a wintry escapist fable, Silver Skates while perhaps not doing the original novel justice nevertheless succeeds as a modern-day skating spectacle with elements of historical period romantic drama radiating through it.  A broadly appealing riff on James Cameron’s Titanic in a different kind of frozen water, the Russian Netflix Original might be second to The Irony of Fate as a distinctly New Year’s Eve driven love story told on a grand scale.  The camera loves the first-time two leads and the sheer amount of veteran Russian actors as well as Irish and French stars surrounding them rounds out Silver Skates as a glittering escapist ensemble fantasy skating fans will take to immediately as a gift-wrapped Christmas present in a winter wonderland.

--Andrew Kotwicki