HOW I ENDED THIS SUMMER A-
Russia (124 mi) 2010 d: Aleksei Popogrebsky
In John Carpenter’s THE THING (1982), it’s the Norwegians who are the first to go bat shit crazy from an attack, as The Thing can assume human shape and turn into the body of your best friend, only to turn on you when you least suspect it, a film that shifts the pervading sense of fear from the outside, as expressed by a grotesque excess of blood and gore, to the inside, where a gloomy sense of dread hangs in the air like being engulfed in a cloud of fog. In this film, it’s the Russians who take a stab at the remote isolation of a polar science station in the Arctic region. Inspired by the diaries of Nikolai Pinegin, a painter, journalist, and the filmmaker who made the first documentary films about the Arctic, who also accompanied Arctic explorer Georgy Sedov on his fatal attempt to reach the North Pole in 1912, writing a book “In Icy Expanses,” which the filmmaker read as a teenager, fascinated by polar explorers and “their ability to come to terms with the monstrous vastness of time and space,” eventually moving the actors and film crew to live for three months at the science station in Chukotka at Russia’s northeastern most tip. This film grabbed the attention of the jury at the Chicago Film Festival, taking the top prize, perhaps not because it’s the best film, but because it tells its story so completely different than any of the other films shown. The space is inhabited by only two men, veteran meteorologist Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis) and a recent college graduate Pavel (Grigoriy Dobrygin) who brought his computer and is writing an essay on his summer experience. What’s immediately striking is the vibrancy of the underlying music by Dmitriy Katkhanov, most of it quiet and barely audible, yet striking in its electronic sound design, perfectly matching the superb imagery provided by Pavel Kostomarov, somewhat reminiscent of the breathtaking musical score from Andrei Zvyagintsev’s THE RETURN (2003), another starkly austere and emotionally spare film.
Much like the region itself, the film moves at a glacial pace where not much ever happens except the slow, plodding rhythm of taking scientific measurements and sending the results by radio communiqués. Sergei has a vast knowledge of the region and a history of those who lost their lives working there, some ended up shooting one another, others were killed by a polar bear, where the rigors of the routines become endlessly monotonous, where Sergei records all entries by hand while Pavel uses his computer, occasionally playing video games which puts a charge into the slow pace of the film. The location itself is set on the Arctic Ocean and couldn’t be more strikingly simple and spartan, featuring nothing non-essential, yet a pan in any direction reveals distant mountains and a vast emptiness. Sergei decides he’ll spend a couple of nights fishing for Arctic trout, one of his wife’s delicacies, and in his absence Pavel receives a private, personal message for Sergei, one that he can’t bring himself to deliver, so he gets caught up in a series of lies and deceptions which changes the entire mood from a beautifully spacious desolation to an internalized psychological portrait of fear, where Pavel has a pathological fear of revealing the message’s contents, despite the insistence from his superiors on the radio that they speak to Sergei.
At this point, the director ratchets up the tension and suspense, poisoning the atmosphere with dread, all happening within Pavel’s anxiously unsettled mind, as a helicopter is sent out to find them, where Pavel has 24 hours to find Sergei’s fishing location and send up flairs, where he walks through a vast wilderness of snow, ultimately finding himself on a mountainside engulfed in a patch of fog, where he hears the thunderous sound of the helicopter flying overhead and he lights up a flair, waving it in his arms, yelling and screaming, but it’s useless, as he’s invisible from the air, but the director holds the shot as Pavel walks away in disgust, eventually throwing his flare to the ground, which sends up a cloud of smoke that he walks through, but the shot is held as the smoke clears and a distinct outline of his surroundings can be seen, still holding the shot until the entire composition is perfectly clear, but the sound of the helicopter is long gone. This is a transfixing shot that in its execution recalls the compositions of Tarkovsky, many of which required a lengthy choreography of perfect timing. The unfathomable mental paralysis only grows more serious, as Pavel is bordering on the deranged, unable to face Sergei without running away, even as he has no place to go, hiding in dilapidated, ramshackle huts that haven’t been used for years, starving or freezing to death or both, where the mood of the film veers into the horror genre, a mental deterioration shown with meticulous precision, an eerie descent into a place where only nightmarish catastrophes can happen, where all that exists is the unthinkable, where the director uses time-lapse photography to speed things up to a fevered pitch, before carefully slowing things back down again and once more, holding the shot longer than what we’re anticipating, changing the configuration before our astonished eyes.
