LIES, LIES, AND MORE LIES: Plus gluttony, brutality, and excess of every kind. |
A close-up of a side of beef last inspected in 1965 takes pride of place at the start of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s bold, weird, overwrought first feature, 4. An allusion to Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin? Maybe it’s just a warning of the grotesquerie to come. Khrzhanovsky’s Moscow resembles the Rome of Fellini’s Satyricon, with cellphones. Gluttony, brutality, excess of every kind, with every bizarre face telling a story, and not a pretty one.The stories told by the three protagonists are fanciful, glib, and, as is disclosed by the film’s brief introduction, total bullshit. They meet by chance at 3 am in a bar, and after some philosophical chit-chat about the city’s ubiquitous stray dogs (one of which has just been run over), they tell the stories of their lives.
All lies, of course. Oleg (Vladimir Putin look-alike Yuri Laguta) deals in meat, recycling ancient, frozen carcasses (the opening slab is his). But to these strangers he spins a tale about being a government administrator responsible for the bottled water in the Kremlin. Marina (Marina Vovchenko) is a prostitute, but she claims to be an advertiser promoting a Japanese device that emanates feel-good vibes in the workplace. Vladimir (Sergei Shnurov), a piano tuner, tops them all. He says he works in a top-secret lab cloning people. It’s been going on for decades, and thousands of the clones, or “doubles,” as they’re known in a Dostoyevskian aside, walk the streets or live in gulag-like camps. Of all the cloning models devised, he points out, those that are quadruplicates, the 4’s, fare the best.
Bolstered by this allegorical framework, the film sends the three their separate ways. Oleg heads for a restaurant where he encounters meat he’s never heard of — a specially bred “round piglet.” Vladimir ends up backstage at a club where a bearded guy with creepy fish tanks tells him that a person can become anything, “a stray dog, a rag to wipe a pretty woman’s feet, a piece of meat . . . ” Unwisely, Vladimir scoffs at his words.
Marina’s fate proves the most fertile for Khrzhanovsky’s style and symbology. Zoya, Her sister Zoya (there are four sisters altogether) has died, and Marina takes the long, strange trip by train and foot to the village where Zoya shaped the faces for the dolls the old crones manufactured. Only Zoya knew the secret to shaping the faces, which were made from bread chewed into paste by the old women. Did she use a mold? Can her drunken boyfriend figure it out? Is this what happens when a centralized economy abruptly gives way to unbridled capitalism?
One of these stories, or maybe all three, sums up the current plight of Russia, if not the human condition. Meanwhile, Khrzhanovsky exults in a surreality that ranges from Andrei Tarkovsky to Aleksandr Sokurov to David Lynch and beyond. Maybe he’s included a few too many drunken crones, round piglets, and stray dogs. But images such as the final one, a stark reminder that the old guy with the fish tanks had it right after all, don’t require repetition to raise a chill.
