Crime on the Russian Screen

Agatha Christie’s Arithmetic

Dmitry Svetosarov, who likes showy cinema, is not a very consistent director. Now he flashes with European professionalism `a la Claude Lelouch in The Speed (1983), now he sags into dull naturalism with The Dogs (1990). In The Arithmetic of Murder Svetosarov decided to stay with the traditional detective format. The crime in the film is investigated with all rules of the genre: detailed questioning of witnesses and suspects, the appearance of some convincing alibis and so on.

A Petersburg public flat, at firs sight very common, turns from episode to episode into a mysterious tangle of criminal threads in Agatha Christie’s favorite method: any character could have committed the crime. The film doesn’t limit itself, however, to the arithmetic of a detective thriller. S.Bekhtirev plays the main role of armchair-bound invalid. Never destroying suspense and other attributes of the genre, he creates a contradictory image of the man, aspiring to the… But I shall not reveal mystery. There are many surprises, and the film, although far from a Hitchcockian masterpiece, is psychologically convincing, never dull. And cinematographer S.Astahov demonstrates great skill working in feebly lighted rooms.

Feeling Cheated

The Day Before, form the viewpoint of this writer who is very tired of unprofessional movies about the Mafia, starts riskily. A group of actors, sitting in armchairs, speaks in wooden, false voices about some machinations. In a minute, however, you understand that it’s a sharp parody of Russian F-class action movies.

After this prefatory trick the film’s debuting directors, former actors O.Boretsky and A.Negreba, take an abrupt turn into stylization. The story becomes one of nice, handsome young men and women trying to preserve the ambience of 1970 “kitchen talks” in the ‘90s: sociable jokes, romantic attractions, intelligent discussions. In a word, praise to friendship. In this main part of the movie the attentive viewer will find a lot of cinema quotations from films of the ‘70s by O.Ioseliani, K.Muratova, etc. It’s a playful stylization in many ways. Not for a minute does it become the fruit of cold calculation, or lose its free, elegant spirit of improvisation.

Then the alarming signals of other words intrude on the movie’s intellectual lyricism: a sex maniac attacks one of the heroines; the other charming woman, aiming to prevent a rape, plucks out the eye of a street beggar. After such encroachments the final events of the film, with all their unexpectedness, have a certain logic. Feeling cheated, as were we all in that time, the intellectuals do not become nice heroes. Donning masks and taking up guns, they engage in murder and robbery “to get to the West”. In this way the film reflects the old story of some of Tbilisi’s youthful elite who tried to fly an airplane away from the hated USSR.

After this mutual directorial debut, Boretsky and Negreba decided to go their own ways, though their duet, to my mind, turned out to be organic and united.

Thirst for a Thriller

Former actor A.Haritonov proves, in his directorial debut, that he wants and is able to make thrillers. In Thirst for Passion Haritonov didn’t hide quotations from other films (for example, Kubrick’s The Shining), he built them precisely into the action. The story, about a phantom-twin chasing a young aristocratic lady, is taken from Valery Brusov’s prose and is told according to the rules of classic thrillers in the spirit of Hitchcock: ominous pauses, presentiments of terrible events, and a coldly erotic elegance… all giving the film a necessary style.

Surely, Haritonov is not Kubrick. He isn’t even Brian De Palma. He does have a command of his profession, though, and his actors are good. A.Vertinska is very effective in both role, real and illusory, while I.Kostolevsky, as the police commissar, can compete with the inspector in any American crime-detection TV series.

A Toy-Brick Game

Director and actor I.Okhlobystin likes to astonish the Russian public. I can’t remember the last time some cinema personality as famous as he declared an attachment to drugs. But Okhlobystin has made it several times (now he is very religious man). In his detective story The Arbiter he also spites tradition, splintering stereotypes and playing with them at the same time, as a child does with toy bricks. His characters – a freshman detective with his gray-haired colleague – chase a serial killer. The standard plot becomes the basis for cinematic hints by the director/leading man. Single shots and full episodes periodically quote or resemble the films of Alan Paker (cameraman M.Mukasey doesn’t miss a chance to play with light rays penetrating the blades of a gigantic ventilator), Hitchcock, Friedkin, Lynch and Scorsese.

These ironical quotations and hints help the director turn the film into some kind of retrospective, proving that the style of French post-modernists Luc Besson (Subway) and Leos Carax (Mauvais Sang, Boy Meets Girl) are close to the interests of modern young Russian cineastes. Not accidentally, maybe, many members of The Arbiter’s team resemble (in their creative style) famous parents in some way: actor Kirill Kosakov, composer Artem Artemiev, etc.

The Arbiter counts on aficionados. It’s hard to surprise somebody in the West with this kind of movie. American, French and British cinema, to my mind, has polished such style till it shines. In Russian, I.Okhlobystin’s work is doomed to the TV heading “Not for Everybody”.