Russia has its own rich traditions of satire and the grotesque, but at first glance we may wonder whether in his new film Zoology Ivan I Tverdovsky, a director who, still to turn 30, certainly belongs to the new generation of that country’s filmmakers, has borrowed a leaf from another master of such forms, Franz Kafka. Not unlike the change experienced by Josef K in the Czech writer’s The Metamorphosis, the heroine of Tverdovsky’s film undergoes a grotesque physical transformation: she grows a tail.

Natasha (Natalya Pavlenkova, luminously vulnerable) is a harried single woman working in a deadbeat job in a provincial zoo at an unnamed small coastal town (if it was filmed in Sochi, Russia’s premier Black Sea resort has never looked dowdier or more autumnal). Her colleagues – all women, presented almost parodically as a cruel company of harpies – humiliate her at work, while her home life, living alone with her mother, is emptily routine (the two women, pictured bottom right). The closest she comes to contact is with the animals in the zoo, but stuck in their cramped cages they’re almost as forlorn as she is.  

To explore such depths of pain is somehow to transcend them 

But there’s something remarkable in Pavlenkova’s features, her ability to turn an emotion almost on a pin: she conveys simultaneously a sense of being utterly run-down and depressed, while at the same time admitting a hint that something better may be around the corner. The appearance of her tail – an ugly, pronouncedly phallic protuberance that hangs from the bottom of her back – is as perversely exciting as it is confusing. She visits the doctor, treated there as if nothing is out of the ordinary: the main thing is to stop it wiggling when she is sent off for X-rays (pictured below). That’s despite the fact that rumours are going around the neighbourhood that there’s a new devilish presence about, distinguished by exactly what Natasha is trying to hide under her clothes.

The only remotely sympathetic person she encounters is a hospital X-ray technician, Petya (Dmitry Groshev). Though he must be two decades or so younger than her, an attachment begins, as he introduces her to his own private excitements. There’s lovely scene in which they use tin trays to slide down a derelict concrete slope that looks like it’s left over from some cosmic programme, as we witness Natasha’s overwhelming fear about doing something new and unfamiliar change into delight. Inspired by that experience, it only takes a new hairstyle and some new clothes to change her completely, turning that haggard face into something youthfully coy.  They have one date in a disco so desolate that it looks left over from Soviet days, which ends badly when the concealed tail flops out on its own accord. Another time they attend a self-help group, but leave in hysterics at its overwhelmingly ponderous atmosphere (the attendees are a cast of those who have lost their way in life, vulnerable to any new psychic trend, as was indeed the case in Russia in the Nineties). In another nicely nuanced scene she visits a fortune-teller, trying to discover whether Petya’s attachment is serious. The answer to that comes in a night-time zoo scene late in the film, which desolately confounds her expectations even as it disorients ours. What way out can there be? Tverdovsky closes his film with an abrupt cut, as brutal as it is sudden.

We are left to guess at the director’s own position. Is Zoology, as its clinically scientific title might suggest, a coldly objective indictment of Russia today, a human landscape in which the desperate individual is left with nowhere to turn? Significantly one of the places to which Natasha looks for comfort first is religion, but the priest rejects her (her mother is a fervent believer too, equally unable to comprehend, let alone accept anything “different” with any degree of sympathy). The state of the Russian Orthodox Church today, as an hierarchic structure more caught up in its own pomp than engaging in any real sense with its flock, is a frequent enough motif in Russian cinema today (it was touched upon in Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student).

Except in so much as it portrays a society in which the idea of anything like a “national ideology” is bewilderingly irrelevant – ironic, perhaps, that Zoology nevertheless received state funding – Tverdovsky’s film doesn’t engage with politics directly, in the way that Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan did so potently. Rather it leaves the impression that the sickness portrayed is an exclusively human phenomenon (which actually comes closer to what Zvyagintsev treats in his most recent film, this year’s Loveless). Such variations on alienation come up a lot in contemporary, loosely arthouse Russian cinema, often winning international festival acclaim (though not always UK distribution): Zoology took the Karlovy Vary special jury prize this year, and Tverdovsky’s feature debut Corrections Class was also a winner there in 2014.

The question that must surely be asked of such films is: “Does it have any sense of life?” Do we feel anything, even as we register a bleakness of subject and an often sardonic directorial point of view. Tverdovsky is not immune on the latter front, the only hint at counterpoint he offers here coming from the film’s light and limpidly beautiful piano score. But finally any redemption in Zoology comes from the sheer accomplishment of Natalya Pavlenkova’s playing. To explore such depths of pain is, perverse though it may seem, somehow to transcend them.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Zoology

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The first day of rehearsals for The Little Greats was thrilling and terrifying in equal measure: the casts of six shows, the whole chorus, all the creative teams and management milling around and talking nineteen to the dozen in the big, reverberant Linacre Studio at Opera North. Old friends, new colleagues – it was like a mixture of freshers’ week and a first night party. The noise was stupendous.

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AUGUST

Baron Munchausen’s exploits have been filmed before. Terry Gilliam’s star-studded 1988 version floundered thanks to a sub-par script, and there’s an infamous 1943 German adaptation, commissioned by Goebbels. This one, Karel Zeman’s The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, is far better than both. Completed in 1961, it’s technically stunning.

If nothing else, Game of Thrones has surely been the greatest boon to the British acting profession since they invented tights and greasepaint. Part of the fun is trying to think of somebody who hasn’t been in it yet.

Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s 1989 debut feature My 20th Century (Az én XX. Századom) opens on a grandiose scene depicting the first public demonstration of Thomas Edison’s electric light-bulb. We see the wonder of onlookers as they witness the new phenomenon, the brightness of light contrasting with surrounding darkness. The discovery would, in due course, give rise to cinema itself.

Chilean director Pablo Larrain has described Neruda as a “false biopic”, and it’s a film that surprises on many levels in its presentation of Pablo Neruda, the great poet who is his country’s best-known cultural figure. It captivates for the scope of its invention, its ludic combination of reality and artifice, poetry and politics, as well as the contradictions of its central character.

Larrain's last film Jackie was also a biopic with a difference, but Neruda goes further in every sense. It’s also something of a departure from the director’s earlier works, such as No and Post Mortem, which were grounded in the very real context of Chile in the Pinochet years, or The Club, which showed how the inheritance of that totalitarian world endured after its actual circumstances had ended. Set in 1948, Neruda works as a prologue to that era: it was then that Chilean president Gabriel González Videla, who had come to power with a leftist agenda, realigned his loyalties away from Communism in a “sell-out to the empire of the North”.

This symbiotic relationship works very much in one direction 

As well as his renown as a writer, Pablo Neruda was a Senator from the Communist Party, and his denouncement of Videla for this political change of tack made him an immediate enemy of the authorities. We first encounter him in the corridors of power, specifically an anteroom in the Senate that bizarrely seems to function as a combination of common room, urinal and bar (imbibing is plentiful throughout the film). That presents him as statesman, and though the epithet of “the most important communist in the world” may be an exaggeration, the poet’s international reputation, backed by Europe intellectuals including that other great Pablo, Picasso – who makes cameo appearances – gave him real importance in his world.  

The next time we meet him is in a very different conext, at an almost bacchanalian party at the poet’s home, clearly a point of congregation for Chile’s own intelligentsia as well as off-duty public figures. The atmosphere is part fancy-dress fiesta – Neruda costumes himself as Lawrence of Arabia – part cultural salon, presided over by the poet and his wife Delia (Mercedes Morán, pictured below), the Argentine aristocrat whose acceptance of her husband’s philandering was only part of the unwavering support that she gave him. The contrast is highlighted when a Party delegation arrives to warn that he must go into hiding. In the portrayal of Luis Gnecco, an actor with a pedigree in comedy, the poet is a corpulent voluptuary, most unlike more typical revolutionary heroes; although he obviously does not "know what it is to sleep on the floor”, his writings and personality nevertheless inspire real devotion among Chileans.

In a nicely satirical scene, Neruda finds that his connections within the old Chilean aristocracy (which still really runs the country) are of no avail, while his attempt to flee abroad is halted at the border. At which point the film's “wild hunt” sets in. With the poet on the run, his pursuer becomes police inspector Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal, playing with nicely stylised verve), whom we have already encountered in voiceover. The communists may have initially debated whether the poet might be more valuable as a prisoner – we get a glimpse of what his fate in captivity would have been in a desert detention camp under the command of Augusto Pinochet, the nation’s future dictator – but now Party minders will be hurrying him and Delia from one safe house to another. Such furtiveness is alien to Neruda, who can’t resist reappearing at his old haunts, albeit often in disguise.

The trimly moustached Peluchonneau (pictured below) is a creature of fiction in every sense. In his own version he’s the illegitimate son of the founder of the Chilean police force and a prostitute, but actually his identity seems to develop as a product of Neruda's fantasy. The poet certainly seems to be in command of the pursuit, leaving a series of cheap detective stories – one of the writer’s fascinations – behind at each step of the chase (Larrain adds rear projections in Peluchonneau's car scenes, highlighting the detectve tropes). The ultimate indignity he feels is the suspicion that without his target he himself is literally nothing: Neruda may refer to him as “my phantom in uniform”, but it is clear that he is the one writing the script. This symbiotic relationship – “I dream of him, he dreams of me” – works in one direction.

There is rich comedy in the process, as at each stage the hapless Peluchonneau arrives too late, or is defeated by disguises (there's a very funny scene set in a transvestite brothel). His interception of Neruda’s first wife Maria, and attempts to involve her in the process, are brought to a hilariously bathetic conclusion, while his encounter with Delia, no longer following her husband in his escape, provides one of the film's most telling scenes.

The pursuit becomes increasingly frantic, culminating in a dramatic ascent into the snows of the Andean mountains. Those last scenes are beautifully filmed by Larraine’s long-term cinematographer Sergio Armstrong, who also catches the darker period cityscapes of Santiago and the bright colours of Neruda’s festivities – both imagined and not, they have a visual flare that Fellini would surely have relished – with distinction. Federico Jusid contributes a grandiose musical score that feels like a presence in its own right.

“I chased the eagle, but I didn’t know how to fly,” Peluchonneau admits poignantly towards the end. We know from history that Neruda will escape, and flourish in emigration: his pursuer faces the cold end of irrelevance. It's a wry conclusion to a wry film, one which in its playful self-referencing sometimes recalls the work of Peter Greenaway. Larrain may not have set out to "catch" his subject in any predictable way, but his film is certainly imbued with the poet's spirit.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Neruda