Kada za neki film kažu da je mješavina Petera Greenawaya i Dostojevskog, a scenarij je napisao ludi Vladimir Sorokin, hm, pa to vrijedi punjenja čaše vina. I - šljas! Čaša i vino su na zidu!
Ilya Khrzhanovski: 4
"The first hour is pleasant, showing us a funny conversation between three persons who are trying to create something interesting about their being. Then, the long trip in the strange land where degenerated old ladies live is mind shocking, repetitive and hard to see. But the effect is clear. When you felt the isolation, the promiscuity watching Dogville, Chetyre gives you the same medication with a ten times harder concentration. A few weeks after seeing it, you keep a clear and screeching memory. This film is an experience, it brings something different, some points of view are bothering, but a strange feeling added to gorgeous landscape remain in your head after seeing it.". - imdb
"Oh, sweet lord ... I'm not even going to try and summarize what I just saw ... it's like Tarkovsky on crack making a gore film. Simultaneously beautiful, compelling, minimal and truly unpleasant. Body parts removed, others burned, that sort of thing... it seems to involve nuclear science and cloning to harvest body parts. Sci fi? Horror? It just flat out defies description..." - Twitch
"There are some movies that know how to do weird. 4 really nails it.
4 doesn’t have a plot, per se, but it does have a lot of themes. Chief among them, I suppose, is the obvious – a double life, or reflection on life. On the surface, we spend some time with three characters who meet in a bar and lie about themselves. Then we see them mope about. One is a frozen meat vendor, one a piano tuner one a prostitute gone off to mourn the loss of her sister who worked on a Werner Herzog-esque farm making garish dolls. (Indeed, the last third of the movie reminded me quite a bit of Even Dwarves Started Small, with drunken old women in lieu of dwarves.)
I don’t know that 4 is the type of film that should be scrutinized or analyzed. I do recommend experiencing it. I enjoyed it a great deal." - Jordan Hoffman
4 starts out with some prologues where we are shown what the three protagonists do for a living. Volodya is is a piano tuner, Marina is a prostitute, and Oleg sells meat. The three meet by chance in a bar where the bartender keeps falling asleep, and make up elaborate lies about their professions. Marina claims to work in advertising. Oleg claims to deliver bottled water to Putin. Volodya concocts a wild sci-fi story about genetic engineering and claims that thousands of Russians are human clones, and that they have been cloning humans for decades. When they clone four at a time, the "doubles" have the best survival rate.
Volodya later is discussing identity with an old man in front of four aquariums. The man claims he has no identity, that no human does, but that a turtle will always be a turtle. Volodya is more optimistic than the man, and says that humans can choose what they want to be.
Later, Oleg is greeted at home by an old man who might be his father and who is germ-obsessed. He takes off Oleg's shoes for him and puts them in plastic bags, and refuses to cook normal steak, he will only steam meat. He compulsively washes and cleans everything in the house, which drives Oleg to distraction.
Most of the film, however, is dedicated to Marina's journey back to the remote Russian village she grew up in. Certain scenes are repeated with slight variations in the lies she's telling, and we're not quite sure if she's fantasizing or revising her memories or what. The camera work changes from stable and steady in the city environments to shaky and blurred in the countryside. There are a lot of closeups on hands. When she arrives, we see that she is there for her sister's funeral. There were four sisters. Everyone in the village makes dolls. The faces were masks made of chewed bread, and the sister died choking on the bread.
I could spend all day trying to deconstruct the symbolism here, but I think the comparisons to Inland Empire are not totally irrational.
Granted, the subject matter is entirely different. There is discussion of the number 4 not being sacred in any society, and it's visually used as a motif in many of the scenes and mirrors the themes presented in the bar scene of identity crises, replication and anonymity. There are four unnaturally round pigs in the restaurant, four sisters, four dogs, four aquariums. Marat "saves" four dolls, only to have them eaten and destroyed by the dogs. Later, he makes four masks of his own face before hanging himself. The soundscape is very well done, and it's really what holds the movie together a lot of the time. It's a bleak and difficult film to watch.- Amy "circleofdestruction.net"
"Like trying to comprehend that you just got punched in the gut, watching Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4 requires that you live with it for a while in order to let the feeling sink in," writes Laureen Kaminsky, leading off this week's Reverse Shot round at indieWIRE. "This film does not imitate life, it creates it - it lives and breathes a little different from anything you've seen before, and yet the result is somehow painfully recognizable."
Updated through 4/8.
J Hoberman in the Voice: "Although Khrzhanovsky has several tricks up his sleeve, 4's most provocative quality is its ironic surplus of beauty."
At the AV Club, Noel Murray finds 4 "mired in the methodology of contemporary foreign films" and rates it a C.
Reminders: Daniel Kasman, nearly a year ago now (scroll down), and, for Stylus, Sandro Matosevic: "But - let's not fool ourselves - 4 is no Russian Ark and Khrjanovsky is no Tarkovsky, and the case it pushes for the cinema of its own country is never as assuringly resounding as it aims to be."
Back in February, Twitch's logboy found a trailer.
Update, 4/6: Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press: "It's easily the most visceral work of art on screens right now."
Update, 4/7: Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "As opaque as it is mesmerizing, 4 demands open eyes and open minds, but neither is it as difficult as all its weighty silences, oblique detours and countless images of glistening, sweating animal flesh � Mother Russia's raw and seriously overcooked � might suggest."
Updates, 4/8: Cinematical's Ryan Stewart: "Eventually, the film itself seems to fall victim to the kind of degeneration that it is capturing."
Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "Khrjanovsky, in his first film, seeks nothing less than to create a vision of Russia's subconscious, and the results are both unforgettable and so unflattering that the film reportedly created a minor furor in his home country. He's an extraordinarily gifted filmmaker, and 4, before it becomes infatuated with its own Boschian imagery and falls into excessive cronage (cronyism?) and artiness, is haunting, gorgeous and relentlessly bleak." -
"Four, an unassuming number that according to the character of the
film 4 has no cultural or superstitious residues or ramifications, so
director Ilya Khrzhanovsky creates his own. Quite what 4 is about
exactly can be deviously hard to fathom but what is abundantly clear is
the constant references and symbolism Khrzhanovsky attributes to his
favoured number throughout the film, from the superbly disarming opening
to the macroscopic themes soaring in the stratosphere of this piece’s
construction. Everywhere one cares to look the number four emerges
coquettishly from dogs in a street to bodies slumbering in a bed, or
more goadingly by showing three with an absence such as a pig’s head
thrown into a pen of the remaining three swine.
Three diverse characters meeting in a lonely late night Moscow bar regale each other by recounting outright lies about their lives, spanning the plausible to the fanciful. A meat wholesaler admits he is the Presidential purveyor of mineral water, direct from the source of Volga, a prostitute says that she is in advertising and a piano tuner ups the ante by confessing to being a covert geneticist involved in a government cloning scheme which has been active since the 1930s. We then follow the prostitute as she visits her home village to attend the funeral of her sister and the protracted wake.
Part of the brilliance of this outstanding debut work is the sheer range the director covers, changing pace effortlessly to weave a tour-de-force of narrative technique and societal critique. Starting with a jarring jolt Khrzhanovsky steals one’s attention and then introduces his characters and their true professions before throwing them together in the bar scene, a witty one-upmanship with wildly unforeseen consequences. Despatching the men to the periphery, the prostitute then takes centre-stage as she returns home for the funeral. Reminiscent of Bela Tarr the prostitute spends at least five minutes walking across a destitute hinterland bridging the gap between the urban and rural, before reluctantly participating in the orgiastic wake with the old woman and apparently sole inhabitants of her village. These women earn a living making dolls with faces constructed from bread. After the previously sparkly pace much of 4’s remainder is a loitering examination of the village as societal exemplar where the conspiracy theories of the city find a resonance.
4 was based on a script by Vladimir Sorokin, a radical Russian writer, and has already been censored there prior to the Rotterdam International Film Festival. A successor to the Russian parallel cinema movement 4’s satirical view of Russia suffers a pathological case of government distrust. At first presented as downright lies concocted to while away the wee hours gradually one wonders if the self aggrandising hyperbole in the bar was in fact a pale watered down version of the actual truth, a set of events too complicated to actually reveal, only hinted at via a society coping as best it can in an utterly uncertain world – the hideous bacchanalian wake of the old women being a prime example. One only need think of the recent Ukrainian elections and many, many other disturbing incidents such as the Nord-Ost theatre gassings to taste the mindset Khrzhanovsky channels. Regardless of all the progress this is still a teenage country weaned in the Soviet era then educated by shock capitalism, where government by the oligarch has been replaced by a concentrated financial concentration in the hands of yet another oligarchy. In this unprecedented environ to wonder about the political reality gap in the Russian new order is merely to view 4 as a telling fable with razor sharp bite.
Whether intentional or not one of Khrzhanovsky’s last scenes is of eerily similar to the mobilisation of the clone army at the end of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones: Vast numbers of army conscripts march onto mammoth aeroplanes that take off in roaring succession. A contrite comparison to Khrzhanovsky’s wilily debut but an informative one indicating the sheer width of thought 4 invokes ensconced in witty striking visuals. The actual ending sums it up really, but knowing too much can be dangerous…" - sneersnipe
Three diverse characters meeting in a lonely late night Moscow bar regale each other by recounting outright lies about their lives, spanning the plausible to the fanciful. A meat wholesaler admits he is the Presidential purveyor of mineral water, direct from the source of Volga, a prostitute says that she is in advertising and a piano tuner ups the ante by confessing to being a covert geneticist involved in a government cloning scheme which has been active since the 1930s. We then follow the prostitute as she visits her home village to attend the funeral of her sister and the protracted wake.
Part of the brilliance of this outstanding debut work is the sheer range the director covers, changing pace effortlessly to weave a tour-de-force of narrative technique and societal critique. Starting with a jarring jolt Khrzhanovsky steals one’s attention and then introduces his characters and their true professions before throwing them together in the bar scene, a witty one-upmanship with wildly unforeseen consequences. Despatching the men to the periphery, the prostitute then takes centre-stage as she returns home for the funeral. Reminiscent of Bela Tarr the prostitute spends at least five minutes walking across a destitute hinterland bridging the gap between the urban and rural, before reluctantly participating in the orgiastic wake with the old woman and apparently sole inhabitants of her village. These women earn a living making dolls with faces constructed from bread. After the previously sparkly pace much of 4’s remainder is a loitering examination of the village as societal exemplar where the conspiracy theories of the city find a resonance.
4 was based on a script by Vladimir Sorokin, a radical Russian writer, and has already been censored there prior to the Rotterdam International Film Festival. A successor to the Russian parallel cinema movement 4’s satirical view of Russia suffers a pathological case of government distrust. At first presented as downright lies concocted to while away the wee hours gradually one wonders if the self aggrandising hyperbole in the bar was in fact a pale watered down version of the actual truth, a set of events too complicated to actually reveal, only hinted at via a society coping as best it can in an utterly uncertain world – the hideous bacchanalian wake of the old women being a prime example. One only need think of the recent Ukrainian elections and many, many other disturbing incidents such as the Nord-Ost theatre gassings to taste the mindset Khrzhanovsky channels. Regardless of all the progress this is still a teenage country weaned in the Soviet era then educated by shock capitalism, where government by the oligarch has been replaced by a concentrated financial concentration in the hands of yet another oligarchy. In this unprecedented environ to wonder about the political reality gap in the Russian new order is merely to view 4 as a telling fable with razor sharp bite.
Whether intentional or not one of Khrzhanovsky’s last scenes is of eerily similar to the mobilisation of the clone army at the end of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones: Vast numbers of army conscripts march onto mammoth aeroplanes that take off in roaring succession. A contrite comparison to Khrzhanovsky’s wilily debut but an informative one indicating the sheer width of thought 4 invokes ensconced in witty striking visuals. The actual ending sums it up really, but knowing too much can be dangerous…" - sneersnipe
Razni ulomci (ako vam se ne gleda sve):
A onda ovo. Film Dau:
Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home
The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country's east, making...something. A movie, sure, but not just that. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted.
A steady stream of former extras and fired PAs talked of the shoot in terms usually reserved for survivalist camps. The director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, was a madman who forced the crew to dress in Stalin-era clothes, fed them Soviet food out of cans and tins, and paid them in Soviet money. Others said the project was a cult and everyone involved worked for free. Khrzhanovsky had taken over all of Kharkov, they said, shutting down the airport. No, no, others insisted, the entire thing was a prison experiment, perhaps filmed surreptitiously by hidden cameras. Film critic Stanislav Zelvensky blogged that he expected "heads on spikes" around the encampment.
I have ample time and incentive to rerun these snatches of gossip in my
head as my rickety Saab prop plane makes its jittery approach to
Kharkov. Another terrible minute later, it's rolling down an overgrown
airfield between rusting husks of Aeroflot planes grounded by the
empire's fall. The airport isn't much, but at least it hasn't been taken
over by the film. And while my cab driver knows all about the shoot—the
production borrowed his friend's vintage car, he brags without
prompting—he doesn't seem to be in the director's thrall or employ.
I'm about to write the rumors off as idle blog chatter when I get to the film's compound itself and, again, find myself ready to believe anything. The set, seen from the outside, is an enormous wooden box jutting directly out of a three-story brick building that houses the film's vast offices, workshops, and prop warehouses. The wardrobe department alone takes up the entire basement. Here, a pair of twins order me out of my clothes and into a 1950s three-piece suit complete with sock garters, pants that go up to the navel, a fedora, two bricklike brown shoes, an undershirt, and boxers. Black, itchy, and unspeakably ugly, the underwear is enough to trigger Proustian recall of the worst kind in anyone who's spent any time in the USSR. (I lived in Latvia through high school.) Seventy years of quotidian misery held with one waistband.
The twins, Olya and Lena, see nothing unusual about this hazing ritual
for a reporter who's not going to appear in a single shot of the
film—just like they see nothing unusual in the fact that the cameras
haven't rolled for more than a month. After all, the film, tentatively
titled Dau, has been in production since 2006 and won't wrap
until 2012, if ever. But within the walls of the set, for the 300 people
working on the project—including the fifty or so who live in costume,
in character—there is no difference between "on" and "off."
One of the twins admiringly touches my head. Before coming to wardrobe, I'd stopped in hair and makeup. My nape and temples are now shaved clean in an approximation of an old hairstyle called a half-box. All to help me blend in on the set. Only, from here on, I can no longer call it that. According to a glossary of forbidden terms posted right in front of me on the wall, the set is to be referred to as the Institute. Likewise, inside the Institute, there are no scenes, just experiments. No shooting, only documentation. And there is certainly no director. Instead, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the man responsible for this madness, is to be referred to as the Head of the Institute or simply the Boss.
Khrzhanovsky greets me in wardrobe dressed in a black vest over a dark gray shirt, tousled 1950s hair, and decadeless Ray-Bans with a strong prescription. He leads me down one of the endless hallways of the Dau compound to the Institute and, en route, spots a female extra being made up in one of the many makeup rooms.
"Tear off her eyelashes," he says without breaking stride. "She looks like an intellectual whore."
"Well, that was the idea!" the makeup artist yells to his back.
"Sure," says Khrzhanovsky, pivoting on one heel like an ice dancer. "But try to make her look less whorish. Impossible, I know."
A few moments later we reach a passageway between worlds: the door connecting the film's modern production offices, where people are free to eat junk food and peck at laptops, with the time warp of the Institute. A silent guard observes my typewritten pass bearing the Soviet hammer and sickle and date-stamped April 28, 1952. Another frisks Khrzhanovsky, without betraying any deference or even recognition. After a security wand roughly passes over my back—a cell phone; sorry, can't have that inside—I finally step through the door and onto the set. I've heard the tales and seen some pictures. I still gasp.
Before me is an entire city, built to scale, open to the elements, and—at 1 a.m. and with no camera in sight—fully populated. Two guards walk the perimeter, gravel crunching under their boots. Down the fake street, a female janitor in a vintage head scarf sweeps a porch.
The set is roughly the size of two football fields, surrounded by a five-story fantasia of oppressive architecture. One edifice, a woozy take on Lenin's tomb, has an irregular ziggurat leading up to it. A coliseum-like stadium looms over two drab residential buildings. Atonal cello music squalls across the city, issuing from pole-mounted loudspeakers. The sole purpose of it seems to be to make one tense, uncomfortable, on edge.
"Are you going to augment the city with CGI later?" I ask, just to ask something.
Khrzhanovsky jumps in place and winces. "See, if one of the guards heard you, he would fine me a thousand hryvnias [about $125]," he says. "Because you're my guest. It doesn't matter that I am the boss. I get frisked like everyone else. You can't use words that have no meaning in this world."
"Like CGI?"
"Now he would fine me twice."
The fine system is the Institute's latest innovation. Khrzhanovsky decreed it a few months ago, fed up with staffers smuggling cell phones and talking about Facebook. Other finable offenses include tardiness, which costs a whole day's pay, and failure to renew the fake Institute pass. The program has been a hit. Not only has morale improved, a whole new euphemistic vocabulary has sprouted up. ("Google" is now "Pravda," as in "Pravda it.") The fine system has also fostered a robust culture of snitching. "In a totalitarian regime, mechanisms of suppression trigger mechanisms of betrayal," the director explains. "I am very interested in that."
Khrzhanovsky throws open the front door of one of the residential buildings, and here I gasp again. The guts of the set are as elaborate as the set itself. There are hallways that lead to apartments, and in the apartments there are kitchens, and in the iceboxes food, fresh and perfectly edible but with 1952 expiration dates. Again and again, Khrzhanovsky opens cupboards, drawers, closets, showing me matchboxes, candles, loofahs, books, salami, handkerchiefs, soap bars, cotton balls, condensed milk, pâté. He proudly flushes at least three toilets. "The toilet pipe is custom width," he says, "because it makes a difference in the volume and the tenor of the flushing sound." He looks completely, utterly delighted.
Khrzhanovsky came up with the idea of the Institute not long after preproduction on Dau
began in 2006. He wanted a space where he could elicit the needed
emotions from his cast in controlled conditions, twenty-four hours a
day. The set would be a panopticon. Microphones would hide in lighting
fixtures (as they would in many a lamp in Stalin's USSR), allowing
Khrzhanovsky to shoot with multiple film cameras from practically
anywhere—through windows, skylights, and two-way mirrors.
The Institute's ostensible goal was to re-create '50s and '60s Moscow, home to Dau's subject, Lev Landau. A Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Landau significantly advanced quantum mechanics with his theories of diamagnetism, superfluidity, and superconductivity. He also tapped epic amounts of ass. Landau's views on sex and marriage anticipated the Summer of Love by decades. (He and his wife, Kora, lived in an open arrangement he called a "spousal nonaggression act.") His life, ready-made for a biopic, received a nightmarish final act after he crashed his car near Moscow in 1962. The physicist spent two months in a coma. The Nobel Prize ceremony was moved to his bedside.- Michael Idov
I'm about to write the rumors off as idle blog chatter when I get to the film's compound itself and, again, find myself ready to believe anything. The set, seen from the outside, is an enormous wooden box jutting directly out of a three-story brick building that houses the film's vast offices, workshops, and prop warehouses. The wardrobe department alone takes up the entire basement. Here, a pair of twins order me out of my clothes and into a 1950s three-piece suit complete with sock garters, pants that go up to the navel, a fedora, two bricklike brown shoes, an undershirt, and boxers. Black, itchy, and unspeakably ugly, the underwear is enough to trigger Proustian recall of the worst kind in anyone who's spent any time in the USSR. (I lived in Latvia through high school.) Seventy years of quotidian misery held with one waistband.
 One of the film's 210,000 extras. |
One of the twins admiringly touches my head. Before coming to wardrobe, I'd stopped in hair and makeup. My nape and temples are now shaved clean in an approximation of an old hairstyle called a half-box. All to help me blend in on the set. Only, from here on, I can no longer call it that. According to a glossary of forbidden terms posted right in front of me on the wall, the set is to be referred to as the Institute. Likewise, inside the Institute, there are no scenes, just experiments. No shooting, only documentation. And there is certainly no director. Instead, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the man responsible for this madness, is to be referred to as the Head of the Institute or simply the Boss.
Khrzhanovsky greets me in wardrobe dressed in a black vest over a dark gray shirt, tousled 1950s hair, and decadeless Ray-Bans with a strong prescription. He leads me down one of the endless hallways of the Dau compound to the Institute and, en route, spots a female extra being made up in one of the many makeup rooms.
"Tear off her eyelashes," he says without breaking stride. "She looks like an intellectual whore."
"Well, that was the idea!" the makeup artist yells to his back.
"Sure," says Khrzhanovsky, pivoting on one heel like an ice dancer. "But try to make her look less whorish. Impossible, I know."
A few moments later we reach a passageway between worlds: the door connecting the film's modern production offices, where people are free to eat junk food and peck at laptops, with the time warp of the Institute. A silent guard observes my typewritten pass bearing the Soviet hammer and sickle and date-stamped April 28, 1952. Another frisks Khrzhanovsky, without betraying any deference or even recognition. After a security wand roughly passes over my back—a cell phone; sorry, can't have that inside—I finally step through the door and onto the set. I've heard the tales and seen some pictures. I still gasp.
Before me is an entire city, built to scale, open to the elements, and—at 1 a.m. and with no camera in sight—fully populated. Two guards walk the perimeter, gravel crunching under their boots. Down the fake street, a female janitor in a vintage head scarf sweeps a porch.
The set is roughly the size of two football fields, surrounded by a five-story fantasia of oppressive architecture. One edifice, a woozy take on Lenin's tomb, has an irregular ziggurat leading up to it. A coliseum-like stadium looms over two drab residential buildings. Atonal cello music squalls across the city, issuing from pole-mounted loudspeakers. The sole purpose of it seems to be to make one tense, uncomfortable, on edge.
"Are you going to augment the city with CGI later?" I ask, just to ask something.
Khrzhanovsky jumps in place and winces. "See, if one of the guards heard you, he would fine me a thousand hryvnias [about $125]," he says. "Because you're my guest. It doesn't matter that I am the boss. I get frisked like everyone else. You can't use words that have no meaning in this world."
"Like CGI?"
"Now he would fine me twice."
The fine system is the Institute's latest innovation. Khrzhanovsky decreed it a few months ago, fed up with staffers smuggling cell phones and talking about Facebook. Other finable offenses include tardiness, which costs a whole day's pay, and failure to renew the fake Institute pass. The program has been a hit. Not only has morale improved, a whole new euphemistic vocabulary has sprouted up. ("Google" is now "Pravda," as in "Pravda it.") The fine system has also fostered a robust culture of snitching. "In a totalitarian regime, mechanisms of suppression trigger mechanisms of betrayal," the director explains. "I am very interested in that."
Khrzhanovsky throws open the front door of one of the residential buildings, and here I gasp again. The guts of the set are as elaborate as the set itself. There are hallways that lead to apartments, and in the apartments there are kitchens, and in the iceboxes food, fresh and perfectly edible but with 1952 expiration dates. Again and again, Khrzhanovsky opens cupboards, drawers, closets, showing me matchboxes, candles, loofahs, books, salami, handkerchiefs, soap bars, cotton balls, condensed milk, pâté. He proudly flushes at least three toilets. "The toilet pipe is custom width," he says, "because it makes a difference in the volume and the tenor of the flushing sound." He looks completely, utterly delighted.
The Institute's ostensible goal was to re-create '50s and '60s Moscow, home to Dau's subject, Lev Landau. A Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Landau significantly advanced quantum mechanics with his theories of diamagnetism, superfluidity, and superconductivity. He also tapped epic amounts of ass. Landau's views on sex and marriage anticipated the Summer of Love by decades. (He and his wife, Kora, lived in an open arrangement he called a "spousal nonaggression act.") His life, ready-made for a biopic, received a nightmarish final act after he crashed his car near Moscow in 1962. The physicist spent two months in a coma. The Nobel Prize ceremony was moved to his bedside.- Michael Idov
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