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Fantastic
Journey
By Ann Morrow
Russian
Ark
Directed by Alexander Sokurov
Russian documentary direc- !tor
Alexander Sokurov has been in an accident, but he doesn’t
remember what happened to him. He falls in with a group of
excited, gaily dressed people—he surmises from their clothes
that they are from the 19th century—and follows them into
the Hermitage, the iconic museum in St. Petersburg. A ghost
of his former self, he narrates his disorientation to the
audience, and then his bewilderment at being spoken to by
“a stranger” from the same era. The stranger, a French diplomat
(Sergei Dreiden), is similarly flummoxed by being suddenly
able to speak Russian. The ghost and the diplomat travel the
narrow stairs and hallways of the museum’s theater, passing
by Peter the Great as he pistol-whips a general, and the ghost
wonders if he is in some sort of staged drama put on just
for him.
He is, and he isn’t. Sokurov’s astonishing Russian Ark
is a 96-minute, single-take swoop through the opulent interiors
of the six-building Hermitage, a rigorously and beautifully
choreographed grand tour shot by digital Steadicam in real
time. The film is also a surreal travelogue through 300 years
of the Hermitage’s tumultuous history, wherein the ghost is
swept up in a dream seemingly not of his own making. The two
time travelers try to distinguish between Catherine I (creator
of the magnificent Winter Palace that is the heart of the
Hermitage) and Catherine the Great (who finished the palace
and started its art collection). They eavesdrop on the museum’s
last three directors, who bemoan the effects of Communism
on culture. They peek in on the doomed Nicholas and Alexandra
sitting down to dinner. And as they make their way through
the museum’s masterpieces of Western art, architecture and
music, a realization slowly dawns that it is the Hermitage
itself that is dreaming. In the film’s most imaginative moment,
Anastasia Romanov skitters down a corridor with a flock of
nymphs come to life out of a Victorian painting.
The more a viewer knows about Russian history, the more moving
these dreamscapes may be. Approaching a closed door, the ghost
warns the diplomat: “Don’t go in there.” Ignorant of 20th-century
events, the diplomat opens the door, and meets with a madman
hammering coffins among stacks of empty picture frames. This
fragment of memory comes from World War II, when the treasures
of the Hermitage were shipped to the Urals for safety and
the palace was used for a bomb shelter. Many of the museum’s
staff died of starvation, but not a single artwork was lost
(Russian Ark takes on added poignancy in the wake of
the looting of the Iraq National Museum).
The film also works as a drolly amusing commentary on the
Western tradition. The diplomat, who represents European snobbery,
pooh-poohs nativist Russian art and goes into rapture over
French sculpture and Dutch portraiture. “Not bad,” is all
he’ll concede when entering Vasily Stasov’s staggeringly beautiful
Armorial Hall, which is being set for a royal banquet. The
diplomat is shooed away by the waiters, and throughout, the
two travelers must keep a swift pace as they wander from one
palatial room to the next, out of place and out of time. Remarkably,
the camera keeps them close company with nary a misstep for
the entire labyrinthine journey.
Sokurov’s technical achievement comes to full fruition with
the long climactic sequence, the grand ball given by Nicholas
II that is remembered as the last of its kind. The glittering
fete not only marks the official end of the Age of Enlightenment
and the reign of the Romanovs, it also embodies the dream-come-true
of Peter the Great, the first to envision Russia as an equal
to the greatest nations of Europe. And as the ghost floats
away from the ball into the future, Russian Ark completes
this 300-year memory with the mysterious immediacy of a real
dream.
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For
better and for worse: (l-r) Levy and O’Hara in A
Mighty Wind.
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In
Perfect Harmony
A
Mighty Wind
Directed
by Christopher Guest
In the early ’60s, fresh-faced white people with nifty striped
shirts and acoustic guitars moved a lot of product with pitch-perfect,
shiny happy folk music. No matter if they were singing (or,
more accurately, singin’) about civil rights or labor
strife, the harmonies were too precise and the spirit too
earnest for the music to be anything but jarringly sweet and
wholesome. When shaggy-haired, leather-jacketed, rough-voiced
Bob Dylan became a star, these middle-class folkies seemed—not
to be unkind—square to the point of goofiness.
This is the strange, prehistoric world Christopher Guest and
Eugene Levy re-create in their latest faux documentary, A
Mighty Wind. The details are presented with frightening—and
hilarious—verisimilitude, from the hair and clothes to the
album covers and “vintage” TV clips. The context and characters
are equally convincing.
Legendary folk music producer Irving Steinbloom dies, and
his children decide to stage a memorial concert. Jonathan
Steinbloom (Bob Balaban) may know nothing about show business,
but his doggedness and annoying anal-retentive nature prove
effective in persuading the Folksmen (Michael McKean, Harry
Shearer and Guest), the New Main Street Singers (including
Parker Posey, Jane Lynch and John Michael Higgins) and Mitch
& Mickey (Levy and Catherine O’Hara) to reunite—after
a 40-year-gap—for the show. Of course, time has worked its
evil magic. The New Main Street Singers (with only one original
member) are now theme-park headliners with a cultish bent.
The Folksmen, who regard the Main Streeters with contempt,
pride themselves on an integrity that is nothing if not ridiculous.
Mitch is now a Brian Wilson-esque wreck, and Mickey is remarried
to a catheter salesman. This rich comic material is beautifully
developed.
As with their previous collaborations, Waiting for Guffman
and Best in Show, Guest and Levy did not write a script
per se. Instead, they wrote an outline of the story and scenes,
and created detailed biographies of each character. The cast—a
mix of improv comedians and method actors—made up their own
dialogue. The result is a wonderful mix of grand comic figures
like Balaban’s clueless would-be impresario and O’Hara and
Levy as the former sweethearts of folk; and perfect miniatures
such as Posey’s damaged-but-cheerful young woman and Ed Begley
Jr.’s Yiddish-babbling Swedish TV exec. Fred Willard—whose
boorish TV announcer stole the last half-hour of Best in
Show—is terrific as another oafish lout.
What really sets A Mighty Wind apart are the songs
written for the film. Sometimes silly, sometimes cruel in
their dead-on parody of the genre’s pretension and obsession
with authenticity, almost every tune is laugh-out-loud funny.
The exceptions are the songs for Mitch & Mickey, which
have an unexpected sweetness (and seriousness) to match the
poignancy of the characters. O’Hara and Levy carefully balance
comedy and pathos; their final moments onscreen, first touching
and then absurd, are representative of the entire film. A
Mighty Wind is a warmhearted laugh at an era as dead as
the dinosaurs.
—Shawn
Stone
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