It was the night Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, those old robbers on the run, will want to forget. Thanks to a clerical error, the Oscar for Best Picture briefly ended up in the clutch of the overwhelming favourite. Then the mistake was spotted and La La Land had to cede ground to Moonlight.
Bertrand Tavernier’s trip through French cinema is shot through with the love of someone who has grown up with cinema and knows how to communicate his passion in a way that is totally engaging. The three hours-plus that he delivers make you want to plunge back into the classics, as well as start discovering many underrated or forgotten directors, actors, DoP’s or film score composers.
What makes the documentary so good is his 100% personal approach – although he is touchingly modest and includes contributions from many of his professional colleagues. It is not a completist’s bible or an attempt at cinema-historical balance. Rather like David Thomson’s unreservedly subjective and opinionated Biographical Dictionary of Film, this is a treasure trove of enthusiasms, presented with a keen knowledge of what underpins the language of great cinema. Tavernier celebrates well-known directors such as Jacques Becker, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Jean-Pierre Melville and Claude Sautet, but he focuses as well on lesser-known directorial talents such as Edmond T Gréville who split his remarkable career between England and France, and many of whose masterpieces, such as Menaces or Brief Ecstasy aren’t available on DVD.
The recurrent figure in Tavernier’s pantheon is Jean Gabin, the French acting icon from the 1930s through to the early 1960s, much more subtle than Depardieu in his depiction of the ordinary Frenchman. As Tavernier demonstrates with many carefully chosen clips, enhanced by an always eye-opening and thought-provoking commentary, Gabin was as fine an actor as any, not just the personification of a nation’s better self.
There are delightful quirks, such as his celebration of the tough-guy actor Eddie Constantine, best-known to British audience for his ironic self-referential role in Godard’s Alphaville, but a regular fixture in a series of often very violent gangster films of the 1950s, which Tavernier greatly enjoyed. He rhapsodises as well about Maurice Jaubert, the film composer, not least the score he wrote for Jean Vigo’s classic L’Atalante. In describing the way in which Jaubert managed to add a dramatic dimension to key scenes of the films he worked on, rather than just fill gaps, Tavernier gives us a lesson in film technique, just as he does in describing the outstanding work of other craftsmen working in the medium.
The film is never didactic, although always surprisingly informative. Tavernier’s exploration of French cinema is made entertaining by a wealth of revealing anecdotes – not least, during the making of Le jour se lève, designer Alexandre Trauner’s insistence that Carné and his producers build an extra floor onto the house (pictured above) which plays such a crucial part in the drama. What stands out perhaps most of all is an extraordinary generosity of spirit – this is a man who can speak about others in his profession with great respect, rare in a milieu where ego rules a great deal of the time. That generosity is contagious: this is a film where the man’s love of the medium is fully shared with his audience. Highly recommended to anyone interested in le cinéma français.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for A Journey Through French Cinema
“Doing work” is the phrase that inmates of California’s New Folsom Prison have adopted to describe the group psychotherapy sessions that have been run there for more than 15 years now. Given that Folsom is a Level-4 penitentiary, in which murder is the least of the convictions for those imprisoned, most of whom will remain locked up there for the rest of their lives, issues of access and trust must have been as challenging as any documentary-maker could expect to encounter.
How The Work co-director Jairus McLeary came to resolve them is a story in itself (of which more later), but the fact that such trust was earned, in spades, is clear from every moment of his remarkable film. The Work is astonishing for many things, not least the degree to which it overturns our expectations of what a prison documentary might be. The inmates whose stories it partially tells may have been convicted of all manner of violent crimes, and were caught up in a gangland system in which extreme displays of masculinity were essential, but the predominant impression McLeary’s film leaves us with is of empathy, understanding, even gentleness (look out for a late scene in which that word features: how revealing it is!).
The moments of surrender to emotion sear viscerally
The Work follows the experience of participants in an intensive four-day therapy programme that is run at Folsom twice a year: they include outsiders, who have volunteered to join the therapy sessions, and inmates with the same motivations, as well as a range of facilitators, all of whom have been through the course before. Apart from the daily scenes of the incomers arriving at and leaving the facility (pictured below), the entire action is set in the prison chapel, which seems to accommodate around 60-80 men, divided variously into groups and sub-groupings; they enter an “Inside Circle”, reflecting the spatial arrangement of their interactions (lower picture). (The programme appeared at the end of the 1990s, and is coordinated by the Inside Circle Foundation, its motto “Helping prisoners and parolees heal from the inside”.)
Three incomers – bartender Charles, museum worker Chris, and teaching assistant Brian – are the film’s immediate subjects from outside. They come with issues that they feel they need to address, but without any certainty as to how things may proceed (degrees of scepticism are allowed all round). The insiders may be slightly less clearly delineated – though Vegas, Dante and Dark Cloud leave unforgettable impressions – and, having been through the course before, are the experienced ones, the guides (another expectation confounded?).
The contrast between different worlds is every bit as acute for the insiders: in their everyday prison routine, gang allegiances – we hear from Crips and Bloods, Aryan Brothers and the Native American Brotherhood – remain absolute, every encounter involving group loyalty. Beyond the chapel walls, in the prison yard, the admissions of vulnerability we witness here would be unthinkable, if not fatal, as would be the ability shown to engage so empathetically with erstwhile enemies.
The moments of surrender to emotion sear viscerally, the acuity with which these individuals talk of their circumstances no less so. We move between more controlled discussions into instances that involve confrontation with the past, a journey accompanied by extreme grief and frantic energy. These outpourings are met with a support that is literally physical, as bodies move in a mass across the floor, or writhe in heaps on the ground to restrain eruptions of feeling. It’s interspersed, cathartically and necessarily, with moments of joking and laughter. The particular issue that comes up most powerfully in the four days depicted in the film is that of fathers and sons – fathers whose absence, physical and/or emotional, from the childhoods of their offspring has continued the destructive patterns by which they themselves were forged.
It’s clear, however, that another four days might have brought up different themes entirely, making The Work that rare thing, a documentary which, though it clearly involved absolute planning and preliminary engagement, evolved in a completely uncharted environment. This DVD release gives valuable perspective on the process, a “framing” of the kind mentioned in the film itself: what we see on screen seems almost completely unmediated.
The main extra is the press conference from this year's Sheffield Documentary Festival (where The Work won the Audience Award), telling us something of how the film came about. Joined by his co-producer brothers Eon and Miles, Jairus McLeary recalls how he came to Folsom, through their father James, who had grown up in similar gangland circumstances to the prison inmates, albeit in Chicago (McLeary Sr. is now a psychologist, and CEO of Inside Circle). Jairus, who also contributes a booklet essay, first participated in “The Work” in 2003 and has since been through it many times; he made sure that all crew members also took part, which must have paid off, notably in the ease with which cinematographer Arturo Santamaria works: assisted by a team of assistants, his roving cameras capture, seemingly effortlessly, the fluid circumstances of the sessions.
The filming took place in 2009 after which, though it’s not made explicit here, the McLearys clearly hit a post-production hiatus, resolved only when British co-director Gethin Aldous came on board in 2015. He was accompanied, not least, by editor Amy Foote: the full material shot was presumably enormous, including extensive formal pre-interviews with the founders of Inside Circle which, given the intensity of the direct material, were never used.
The immediacy of the experience is such that contemplation comes only later. We are left to wonder where exactly the concept behind “The Work" came from. A prison riot at Folsom in 1997, which was followed by a seven-month lock-down, may have played a part in affecting the attitudes of the authorities. There’s mention of the Inside Circle founders being influenced by the writings of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist (and Holocaust survivor), while the more extreme moments of emotional release hint at Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy. But finally this is a profoundly human-to-human experience, one which offers, in the bleakest of environments, a sense of hope against hope. Among the motivations for prisoners to take part is that it may influence their chances for parole: over its history, some 40 or so have been released in such a way. Watching The Work, you won't forget one of its inmate-participants, Vegas – he is now one of them.
Overleaf: watch trailers for The Work
Albert Serra has earned himself the directorial moniker “the Catalan king of stasis”, and nothing in The Death of Louis XIV is going to dispel such a reputation – if anything, he has honed that characteristic approach further, concentrating this story of the declining days of the Sun King into a single royal bedchamber. However, there is one new element: it’s the first time the director has worked with professional actors, which at least ensures that his film's studiedly visual longeurs are handled with first-class Gallic thespian assurance.
Never more so than from French New Wave legend Jean-Pierre Léaud in the title role: he plays the 76-year-old fading monarch with an assurance no less absolute than the rule that the longest-serving king of France had exerted in life. Much has been made of the difference between Leaud’s very first screen role – in particular, that closing freeze frame of Truffaut's The 400 Blows – and the practically immobile intensity that he conveys here, and the contrast could hardly be more acute. It’s a bravura performance, which somehow compels attention over 115 occasionally agonising minutes, catching a sense of character in minute movements of the face or variations in exhalations of breath.
Louis has a pain in his leg; as it worsens, he is confined to bed; eventualy gangrene sets in. The process of dying is slow and laboured, and the principle action – hardly the right way of putting it – comes from the deliberations of the doctors who discuss and administer a variety of treatments (pictured above). However, Serra does achieve one scene in which the awareness of approaching death becomes transfixingly clear, as Léaud stares into the camera, unforgettably locking the audience’s gaze. It's a stark moment of contrast in mood, the breach of the fourth wall emphasised by the accompaniment of Mozart’s Great C minor Mass (there is no other incidental music in the film).
The silence and stasis is broken, to varying degrees, by Serra’s depiction of the court, or at least that element of it that appears in the anteroom of the monarch’s bedchamber. Comedy is probably not the right word (and satire not much more appropriate) but the stylised sycophantic attentions are memorable. His Royal Highness is applauded – Bravo, sire! – for every small gesture he manages, a flourish of the hat, or managing to eat a single biscotto. There are early innuendos that hint at past sexual liaisons, but by this stage his affection for his dogs seems more powerful than anything else. Part of the time his secret wife Madame de Maintenon sits inscrutably to one side, while another episode (main picture) brings a visit from his five-year-old successor, the future Louis XV. Don’t imitate me in architecture, or war, is the gist of his advice.
No wonder Molière gets a mention, with quacks like these around
Louis has a right royal caprice, calling urgently for water in the night, then refusing to drink it except from a crystal goblet. “Let me know when you’ve decided to cure me,” he harrumphs to his physicians. The doctoring is grimly comic, led by Fagon (Patrick D’Assumcao) who variously prescribes remedies like donkey’s milk, and tries to resist bringing in outsiders to consult – first from the Sorbonne, then finally a strangely accented charlatan from Marseilles whose elixir includes bull sperm and frog fat. No wonder Molière gets a mention, with quacks like these around. “We haven’t tried the jelly yet” is just one line that Serra and his co-writer Thierry Lounas might have borrowed from Carry On. Though the film’s title appears to preclude any need for spoiler alerts, there’s a touch of unexpected grotesque to its conclusion. (Hint, sausages.)
Such details are apparently based on medical testament, while the story itself draws on court remembrances, principally the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. After a brief opening scene with Louis in his Versailles gardens, it’s all interiors, which are a triumph for cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg, working exclusively with candlelight to produce a deeply painterly effect – sumptuously rich reds recall the Old Masters – and Sebastian Vogler’s production design. No praise is high enough (literally) for the film's perruquiers.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Death of Louis XIV
Icelandic writer-director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson has made an impressive feature debut with this story of crossing the threshold from childhood to young adult experience. Heartstone acutely and empathetically catches the path from innocence to experience of its two 14-year-old protagonists, Thor (Baldur Einarsson) and Kristján (Blær Hinriksson), in which the film’s twin themes, coming of age and coming out, become uneasily intertwined.
Gudmundsson opens his story at a leisurely pace – and, at a few minutes over the two-hour mark, there’s no calling its rhythm hurried – as we discover the world in which the two teenagers live. It’s the summer holidays, and they’re loping around with friends, fishing from the harbour side of the remote village that is home. When a shoal of fish swims by unexpectedly, the kids are soon struggling to pull them out of the water fast enough, before casually bashing them to death on the concrete. It’s an indicator that nature here is coloured by tooth and claw (an allusion referenced literally in one early visual), without overmuch room for sentiment. Such a mood will colour the human development that follows, too.
But this is also nature, in the sheer physical sense, at its most impressive (pictured above). The craggy coast around the cluster of houses that makes up the isolated village rises up towards spectacular mountains, which somehow dwarf any human activity with their scale. In summer, as the light stretches around the clock, the beauty is awesome, memorably captured in Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s widescreen vistas. But we sense that when winter comes – Heartstone closes as the first dusting of snow falls – the cold isolation of the place will be as complete as the luminous airiness with which it seasonally alternates.
Coming-of-age stories like this, especially from Nordic and Scandinavian climes, are almost a trope of cinema, often defined by the gentleness of their revelations, the sometimes quirky benignity of their settings. Gudmundsson consciously avoids any such tenderness, with nature’s cruelties mirrored in the immediate human environment, like how the village’s older teenagers tease the younger generation. There’s a similarly sharp atmosphere at home, with existence for the sensitive Kristján dominated by a hard-drinking father, and family life for Thor – the nice irony of his name is emphasised by the fact that, though he’s determined and tough, he’s still a minnow in size – coloured by two elder sisters who are as unforgiving with him as they are with their single mother (Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir, a lovely performance).
The father has gone off with a younger woman, and any sympathy for their mum's tentative attempts to find someone to date in this backwater is notably lacking. We see what it involves for her when the adults get together for the village-hall dance – a thrash, if ever there was one – and her attention falls on the outsider Sven (Søren Malling, a visitor in every sense: he’s Torben, from Borgen). Nevertheless there’s a sense of tough-love affection in this family unit that is finally reassuring, as well as an element of comedy to the sisters, Hafdis (Ran Ragnarsdottir) particularly; she writes poetry of Plath-like intensity that she reads out at meals.
Contrasting yet complementary female company comes with Beta (Dilja Valsdotttir) and Hanna (Katla Njalsdottir, pictured together above), with whom the boys tentatively explore the first hints of sexual consciousness at furtive sleepovers, which come with games of Truth or Dare, the forfeits precipitating different kinds of intimacy. Gradually the unsuspecting best-friend closeness between Thor and Kristján becomes something more complicated, though the scenes of revelation are laced with a lightness that allows for it all to be treated as game-playing. The ramifications become clearer in an episode in which the four of them go camping on their own in the mountains, where the landscape itself seems to pull a response from Kristján that he somehow can’t resist.
Gudmundsson treats the repercussions of his story with understated sensitivity: Heartstone may have won the “Queer Lion” at last year’s Venice film festival, but the sexuality here is one of exploration rather than action (Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy is one other such film that comes to mind). In all such tales of the growing self-awareness of youth, the quality of the playing from the young cast is crucial, and Gudmundsson has drawn hugely sensitive performances from his two leads. The landscapes that surround them may be monumental and memorable, but the sincerity and naturalness of these two performances is almost microscopically exact.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Heartstone
The Viennale is one of the best film festivals in the world and an indispensable part of Vienna’s cultural life. Yet this year’s edition was launched amid trying times.
While bird-lovers will certainly not be disappointed by Portuguese auteur João Pedro Rodrigues’ new film, the ambitions of The Ornithologist stretch considerably beyond such avine fascinations. Its opening title, “Whoever approaches the Spirit will feel its warmth, hence his heart will be lifted up to new heights,” ascribed to St Anthony of Padua, hints at a distinctly sacred element, and in fact Rodrigues’ film is (very) loosely based on the life of that saint, the patron both of the director’s native Lisbon and of the lost, another theme that becomes central to his film.
That is not, however, our first impression of the film’s protagonist Fernando (played by French actor Paul Hamy) as he methodically prepares for a day’s bird-watching in an isolated nature reserve, its remoteness defined by the unreliability of any mobile signal; Fernando ignores messages that come through from his presumed partner, who is concerned about his welfare and, in particular, whether he’s taking his medication. Instead he’s determined to enjoy his solitude in this stunningly beautiful landscape, canoeing down the river through high gorges, observing the impressive variety of birds that wheel overhead; his interests clearly go beyond those of the amateur, and he records his observations into a tape-recorder (ornithology was a passionate interest of the director in his youth).
But this absorption means that he fails to notice approaching rapids in the river, and the next thing we know his body is found by two Chinese girls who are hiking through the thick forest, obviously very lost indeed from their Santiago pilgrimage route. From here on the tone of Rodrigues’ film moves ineffably towards the bizarre and spiritually highly-strung: when Fernando wakes up next, he’s been trussed up with ropes, à la St Sebastian, by the pilgrims. Narrowly escaping that one, his attempts to find his way back to civilisation (whatever that might mean in such a context) seem doomed, every new encounter stranger than the last.
Climbing cliffs and negotiating the rocky river bank, he finds that the wreckage of his canoe has become a kind of shrine (main picture), and witnesses strange night-time rituals that hint at a pagan world. (Knowing that these are being conducted in Mirandese, Portugal’s rare minority language, and that the multi-coloured rag vestments are part of the careto ritual may not sufficiently alleviate the viewer’s sense of bafflement.) An unexpectedly sexual tryst ensues with a deaf-mute goatherd (Xelo Cagiao, pictured above with Hamy), turning suddenly violent in a manner that would certainly have intrigued Derek Jarman.
Though Rodrigues himself may not be a believer in any usual sense, there is certainly a sacred quality to the conclusion of his film, which sees the director himself step into the role of his protagonist
But it’s when, around the 100-minute mark, Fernando is pursued by bare-breasted horseback Amazon warriors speaking Latin that The Ornithologist finally loses any semblance of connection to the world as we traditionally know it. The observation delivered at one point here, "There are certain things we shoudn't try to understand", has rarely rung truer. Though Rodrigues himself may not be a believer in any usual sense, there is certainly a sacred quality to the conclusion of his film, which sees the director himself step into the role of his protagonist, as Fernando becomes known as Antonio: the change of name mirrors that of the life of St Anthony, and for those still keeping up there are other episodes from the life of the saint that are referenced, including his talking to the fish.
It’s certainly weird, and rather wonderful. A sublime coda takes the protagonists, Chinese pilgrims included, somewhere else altogether, that closure set to the magnificently secular anthem of Antonio Variacoes’ Canção de Engate; until that point the spare scoring has involved anxiously strangled string sounds from French cellist Séverine Ballon (development on The Ornithologist was slowed by Portugal’s financial crisis, and it became a coproduction with France). Cinematographer Rui Poças, known for his work with Miguel Gomes on Tabu and the wonderful Our Beloved Month of August, catches both the glories of the film's landscapes and the increasingly hallucinatory strangeness of its later action. (After all, we may wonder whether what we have been witnessing are psychotropic figments of Fernando’s imagination, brought on by his not taking his medication).
Rodrigues himself has described what he was aiming for in the film as a “Pasolini-type” Western, and in the sense that we follow an unusual journey that ends in a degree of enlightenment, it’s an allusion that is more helpful than confusing. The Ornithologist won Rodrigues the Best Director award at last year’s Locarno festival, and the film is quintessential festival fare: it certainly won’t win over all viewers – indeed, as a multiplex-emptier it would be unsurpassed – but for those who are persuaded, its eclectic fancy should exert an oblique fascination.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Ornithologist
Director Dan Sickles has known Dina her entire life. He knows her engaging personality, and he knows her tragic past. It’s the former which he and co-director Antonio Santini feel is worth celebrating in this Sundance award-winning documentary.
Dina is a 48-year-old widow who views the world with childlike optimism. Her charm and openness are immediate – traits which have enamoured her fiancé Scott. Together they make a winning team, each growing from the other’s support, love and unconventional nature. Alongside a rolling cast of friends, family and unsuspecting strangers, we watch the couple reach new milestones in their relationship.
The film is a fascinating look at love – one that is not traditional but unarguably unconditional. The leads are admirably open about the issues they face around sex: Scott uncomfortable with physical contact and Dina paranoid about Scott’s disinterest. It's an honest and subtle insight into how people living with autism navigate relationships..
On face value, the film appears to follow two eccentric people as they plan their marriage. Certainly in the first half-hour, there’s a creeping sense that we’re jumping from one awkward social situation to the next with no clear direction. This is deliberate. We begin like the unsuspecting strangers, only seeing the quirks. Sickles and Santini do not spell out Dina and Scott’s history; we get to know them as people first because it means all the more once we find out what they’ve experienced.
This is highlighted in the film’s final moments, three gut-wrenching minutes made all the more affecting because they follow 90 minutes of relationship-building. The story here is the people Dina and Scott are, not what they’ve been through or what they’ve been diagnosed with. The approach works: somewhere along the way you begin really caring for these characters.
Each scene in Dina appears carefully composed, as if the directors knew that they just had to frame the shot and the material would come. There must be hours of footage left on the cutting-room floor, but the editing seamlessly compiles sequences together. Much of the comedy (and there’s a lot) is drawn from here, including a montage in which Scott shops for tuxedos while Dina browses an S&M shop.
While it’s rewarding to focus on character and not story, it does mean Dina drags in the middle. After watching the couple catch their 10th bus, you can be forgiven for wondering where this is all going. Perhaps it would reward rewatching once Dina’s backstory has been revealed, although this would defeat the point of not tackling it from the beginning. Dina is really about two people very much in love. Dina’s history is overwhelming, but she hasn’t let that define who she is and neither has the film. As a piece of cinema, it’s a surprisingly poignant treat.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Dina
It takes a while to get going, and doesn’t altogether evade sentimentality but overall this black comedy is hugely endearing. Rolf Lassgård (complete with bald cap) plays Ove. He's a depressed and resentful 60-year-old widower who can’t see any point in life without his beloved wife, especially since he's been made redundant from his job as an engineer. His suicide attempts are thwarted by poor quality materials and a rag-bag collection of neighbours.
Flashbacks to Ove's childhood and courtship are beautifully done, but it’s the portrait of Swedish small-town life that intrigues. This isn’t the hipster noir of the big cities familiar from TV thrillers, nor the relentlessly chirpy utopia of the IKEA catalogue. Ove lives on a drab housing estate with strict rules – many of which he originated as the residents' association chairman. He’s a classic curmudgeon ticking off dog owners and careless drivers alike, but at the same time he hates the "white shirts" – the officious bureaucrats whom he views as opportunistic bastards only interested in money. Imagine a Swedish live-action version of the Pixar animated feature Up and you'll get the idea (though it's best not to expect balloons). Befriended by a determined new neighbour, pregnant Parvaneh (Bahar Pars) and her husband and children, his attitudes slowly begin to soften.
Based on a hugely popular novel, director Hannes Holm has done a good job fusing social drama and gentle comedy, very much in the vein of My Life as a Dog. There’s a touch of underlying Scandi smugness about how well the country copes with immigrants, but the skirmishes over the relative merits of Saabs or Volvos and a subplot involving a very dishevelled cat win the day (said feline, pictured right). Nominated for two Oscars, A Man Called Ove is set for a remake in America with Tom Hanks in the lead.
This edition comes with a Q&A session from a festival screening in New York, make-up special effects tutorial, and an edited featurette with interviews with the director and the two lead actors. Bahar Pars is particularly good on the dilemmas she faced by effectively becoming the screen representative of Sweden’s large Iranian migrant community.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for A Man Called Ove
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.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Zoology