Shots In The Dark. - Review - movie review

Interview, May, 2001 by Graham Fuller

FROM RUSSIA AND LOOKING FOR LOVE

We may live in a global economy these days, but movies suggest that for romantically fraught young women running from Russia, life is no easier now than it was before the Revolution. In 1916's Sold for Marriage, Lillian Gish played a harassed young Russian immigrant whose family can't wait to sell her to an American. Gish, as usual, needed to be rescued, as does Katia (Natalia Novikova), fresh off a plane from St. Petersburg in this month's Aussie comedy, Russian Doll.

Sharing the sartorial modesty of Erin Brockovich, however, Katia is not defenseless. We meet her trying to get out of Sydney's airport having presumably swept through customs in her pushup bra and leopard-skin micro-mini with no questions asked. This Web-order bride soon finds that her groom has expired in anticipation, but no matter-a few tears later and a married stranger has installed her in a hotel as his mistress.

Soon Katia moves in with her lover's best pal (Hugo Weaving), who agrees to marry her so she can stay in the country. Predictably, they become involved, the humor deriving from their apparent incompatibility. The lugubrious Weaving character mediates his life rather than actually lives it: He is a former private eye, who spied his previous girlfriend having sex with another man through a telephoto lens, and a wannabe novelist; he is, moreover, seeing a shrink. In contrast, Katia is a force of nature, one of those fierce, uncouth, loud Slavic beauties who doesn't dwell on her existence but sings, dances, eats, drinks and makes love because who knows what tomorrow may bring?

Of course, like the Matryoshka doll that she gives to her unimpressed roommate, this flesh-and-blood doll does have an inner life, however deeply buried. It's up to the ex-detective to deduce that she is his soul mate. That he has to eventually track her down in Moscow is unconvincing. The Katias of the world never look back.

Directed (in a disarming '60s style) by Stavros Kazantzidis, a Greek Cypriot emigre, Russian Doll has a touch of Zorba the Greek (1964) in its conflicting value systems (physicality vs. intellect), but it's a romp that can't withstand much critical scrutiny. As a movie about immigrant culture, it fails to characterize the Russian Jewish community of Bondi Beach in which it is set.

Much more trenchant is Arnaud Desplechin's Esther Kahn, which depicts the harsh slum life of a Jewish immigrant family in Edwardian London--one member of which, subdued Esther (Summer Phoenix), breaks away to become an actress. Shown at the Rendez-vous with French Cinema 2001 program at Manhattan's Film Society of Lincoln Center in March, it is a study of acting as a liberating impulse, but also a vividly realistic movie about assimilation.

Whereas Katia favors the exaggeratedly trampy fashions common to Eastern European immigrants with nouveau riche aspirations, Tanya (Dina Korzun), the young Russian divorcee who turns up at a London airport with her 10-year-old son, Artiom (Artiom Strelnikov), in the recent release Last Resort, dresses dowdily in a shapeless red jacket and a black woolen hat. She is, in a sense, a determinedly melancholy escapee from the Soviet Union rather than modern Russia, but what she finds in Tony Blair's Cool Britannia is nothing less than a gulag.

Pawel Pawlikowski, a Polish filmmaker based in Britain, directed Last Resort for the BBC in a quiet realist style similar to Ken Loach's. Like Loach, too, he empathizes with outsiders who are treated like cattle by bureaucrats and the police.

Shipped off to a holding center in the grim seaside town of Stonehaven (actually Margate, in Kent) where, under heavy surveillance, they must wait to be granted political asylum, Tanya and Artiom are befriended by arcade manager Alfie (Paddy Considine), himself a refugee--but from his own messed-up life. Artiom hooks up with a bunch of teenagers hawking booze and TVs to other asylum-seekers. The man Tanya has followed to England meanwhile abandons her in a telephone call, so to make money she models for a cyberporn outfit-truly, now, a citizen of the global economy. Her fantasy of a new start has run aground like the waves breaking on Stonehaven's shore. Although in love with her, Alfie agrees to affect her and Artiom's escape. Unlike Katia, Tanya--who has nowhere to assimilate--can only go forward by going back. This gem of a film is an immigrant dream on rewind.

Graham Fuller is Interview's Film Writer at Large.