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One of the jokes in Bite the Dust (Otdat Konci) is about the ‘so subtle’ Dardenne brothers’ The Silence of Lorna. As for Taisia Igumentseva’s Moving Picture, the saying cannot be applied, and yet, the only Russian film for this year’s Cannes selection of “official” films. While domestic viewers may chuckle at the rural characters’ lunatic attempts to preapare for the end of the world in a remote riverside village, this is of no consequence elsewhere, in any other civilized region, it is marginal festival fare at best.
Last year, she had a much more successful visit to the Croisette when her short The Road To won the best prize in the segment devoted to students. But in true fashion, “The Road to” feature-length narration is stupendously complex. And it doesn’t really help that such apocalyptic motifs have been recurrent over the last two years.
The new director shoots for the stars with a rural demon of deconstructionism and the last thing gives us little more than a handful of guffaws.
We can thank the Mayan civilization and their confusing calendar for this trend which has influenced arthouse darlings such as Lars Von Trier (Melancholia), Abel Ferrera (4:44 Last day on Earth), Gregg Araki (Kaboom), Bela Tarr (The Turin Horse), 2012 and Seth Rogen’s new film This Is The End.
However, the one that stands out is perhaps Alexey Balabanov’s Me Too which casually blends comedy, ominousness, and a peculiar yet very Russian form of eccentricity. On the other hand, Balabanov is a seasoned master of the craft while Igumentseva and scriptwriter Alexandra Golovina show their inexperience as they put too much effort into achieving their intended effects.
The first twenty minutes portray the characters and their scenically remote setting as if towns where time seems to have been frozen in the mid-20th century. The only cultural activity on offer is provided by the widow in her twenties, Nina (Irina Denisova) who uses an overhead projector to screen art-movies for all six of her adult neighbors. This includes married couple, Sanya (Dmitry Kulichkov) and Nastya (Alina Sergeeva), Mikhail (Maksim Vitorgan) and Olga (Anna Rud), old farmer Vassilych (Yuris Lautsinsh), wacky inventor Vanya (Sergey Abroskin), and cranky veteran Pandora Georgievna (Svetlana Kolosov).
The community is jolted out of its calm existence after they hear on the news that a “massive coronal emission” will happen in a couple of days and is expected to destroy 90% of humanity. This revelation leads to a lot of vodka drinking, some re-evaluation of relationships, and even some irresponsible bed-hopping, but not too much in the way of serious despondency. And when the dramatic moment comes and nothing happens, the survivors can finally breathe a sigh of relief even though it may be a bit too soon for that, as they are almost immediately faced with a truly torrential rainstorm.
The flood that follows creates a Southern Wild aesthetic, even though the closest thing to an Auroch is “Candy,” a cow owned by vodka-loving Vassilych, who starts taking a more and more central role in events. At one point, the unfortunate cow has even been seen dressed as a woman thanks to Mikhail and Olga’s moppet’s wielders of a desperate need for fun, like Igumentseva and Golovina who do not restrain children from anything in the search of children’s laughter.
They seem to be held back by their apparent need to focus on each adult character equally. As a result, more stimulating characters, like Nina the cinephile and Zina the ‘grandma’ who refuses to loosen up, are not accurately portrayed. This last section stumbles into antagonistically messy overacting only to end in a term that is vaguely poetic but clumsily so, which annoyingly but by now unsurprisingly is not quite it.
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