4

2005 Russian artsy-fartsiness

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Three strangers walk into a bar, have a few drinks, and have what has to be the longest conversation in the history of cinema, detailing every single last morsel of their lives. They smoke relentlessly; dogs bark outside. After more than a few lies, they depart and wander around in their bleak little lives. Then, some other stuff must happen. Then, I wake up, confused. Dolls get eaten by dogs. A large-breasted woman and some elderly women disrobe. A guy's arrested. There are some goofy looking pigs. I don't know what's going on anymore and wait for the credits. But they never come, and I'm still sitting here today, agonizing and wishing I were never born.

I know things aren't great in Russia, but surely somebody in the country has a tripod that Ilya Khrjanovsky could have borrowed. This handheld camera work was maddening and made me a little sick to my stomach. The imagery was grotesque enough; I didn't need to see it shaking around. It might be that I'm not Russian and missed some cultural stuff, but I found it impossible to care about any of the characters or whatever the heck happened to them. I was bored at the start, and the dullness sustained. This sort of reminded me of Tartovsky's Stalker, another long movie that a lot of people would find entirely pointless and boring, but whereas that was artistic and moving, this one just seemed like an attempt to show off how avant-garde Ilya Khrjanovsky can be. Good story and good film-making was sacrificed to the great God Artsyfart, the omni-incapable and all-noodling. Oppressive sound effects, extended scenes of walking through bleak wastelands, bread-chewing and breast-exposing babooskas with faces like catcher's mitts, general ickiness, more specific ickiness. It's even got a pretentious title. I mean, what are they going to call the sequel? 4 II? I think I've decided that I really hate modern Russian cinema and long for the days when things like this would be banned and never heard of again.