Russian Ark / Russkij kovcheg (2002)

Starring: Sergei Dreiden, Mariya Kuznetsova, et al.
Director: Aleksandr Sokurov

Rating: NR

Studio: Wellspring Cinema

Review Posted: 9.25.02

Spoilers: Minor

Rating: 3/4

By Harvey S. Karten.

Two decades ago, when the Soviet Union was an empire more evil than the regimes of North Korea, Iraq and Iran combined, I found myself in St. Petersburg, and what traveler to that westernized town could avoid the Hermitage? With a temperature of one hundred degrees outside and, considering that whatever Russian was hired to install air conditioning must have gotten lost on his way, that place was hot. So hot, in fact, that I found it hard to appreciate the bounty of the czars, but I was entranced by the way my fellow tourists carefully pronounced the place Uhr mih TAZH, as though the place were in Paris as indeed it might have been.

If only Aleksandr Sokurov's film came out in 1982 instead of just now, I could have avoided the stuffiness of the museum, sitting back in air conditioned comfort in an American movie theater to see the paintings. But there's more. While Sokurov's fantasia looks at some of the creations of El Greco, Van Dyke and others, it puts us in a time capsule wherein we float through Russian history from the time of Peter the Great through the ill- fated regime of Nicholas II. In other words we see the membes of the court as they walk, prance, and dance through the chambers! Seeing the movie won't help you to pass the World History Regents exam since, after all, this merely skips merrily through some high points of life among the Russian aristocracy. But what a dream for lovers of costumes, pageantry, olde worlde splendor, a time gone forever to the regret of at least the principal character of the slender story.

In fact "Russian Ark" is, literally, a dream, one enjoyed by director Sokurov in more ways than one. The arc of the story is like that of a pleasant nocturnal trip that the viewer might even take, having gone to bed after seeing the 96-minute pageant. On an equal plane is the dream of a film geek who loves pictures that break technical ground. What Sokurov does with the ample help of his photographer, Tilman Buttner, is to use a Steadicam camera with some brand new stuff, features which could cause a labor strike by film editors since it does away with them altogether. Though two thousand actors and extras rehearsed for eight months, the entire film was shot in one day and, get this, without a single break! This means if just one person messed up, say, had too much Stoly while putting on his finery, not only would he probably been beaten to a pulp by the rest of the cast, but the entire project would have gone kaput. The Hermitage Museum in St. Pete's was shut down for just that one day to allow a Sony HDW-F900 camera to shoot the entire film in one fell swoop, using a hard disk recording system with a battery that would make Mr. Duracell envious. This system could record up to one hundred minutes of uncompressed image, but it could do so only once.

What do we get for all this technological breakthrough? We get time travel without the lame special effects of an H.G. Wells production such as Simon Wells used in his rendition of "The Time Machine" earlier this year, but with a lot more glitter. The glitter comes not from computer imagery but from real human beings. In the unseen director's dream, he meets a Nineteenth Century French marquis (Sergei Dreiden) who somehow arrives at the Hermitage, a guy who lived before the unification of Germany and before the advent of Richard Wagner who proves this by not knowing what the director is talking about when he mentions that country and that composer. This marquis struts about, occasionally chased away by the guards, as he engages in some playful palaver with the director who is invisible to everyone else. He looks at some of the sculptures and wonders why the Russians seem to have such little confidence in their own ideas and so much love for things European. He examines paintings and explains the meaning of symbols, such as the chicken and the cat in one such European piece of art.

When the French diplomat is tired of Peter the Great's court, he advances through the decades at the Winter Palace of the czars, which is now the aforementioned Hermitage, watching the aristos of the court shuffle about, culminating in a slam-bang conclusion Czar Nicholas II's huge cotillion-type ball in which gents and their ladies bounce about to a mazurka played by an orchestra under the direction of Valery Gergiev. The final scene has all the drama of Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," except that instead of the felling of a prized tree, the scene changes to an ominous, foggy, black and white to symbolize the coming revolution. In the most wrenching piece of dialogue, the unseen director urges the French diplomat to come on, to move on, but the Frenchman wants to stay there in the Winter Palace who can blame him?

"Russian Ark" played at the major festivals: Telluride, Toronto, and the New York Film Festival, and is not meant for the audience of sci-fi buffs who went for "The Time Machine" or fantasy lovers whose idea of greatness if "Lord of the Rings." This is a mature, deeply felt work by a man whose oeuvre includes nineteen documentaries and thirteen features, the best-known here in the U.S being "Mother and Son." "Russian Ark" could inspire its audience to visit the Hermitage not me, because as I say I'd rather sit in an air conditioned theater and listen to the guided tour of the paintings and might be a bit disappointed if I failed to see the handsome couples dancing through its many rooms. Darn that Lenin!

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