The New Lopushansky — Almost a Straight "Gentle Creature"

It's a real pleasure when a film not only meets what you expected but goes past it. That's what happened with Konstantin Lopushansky's new one — I've followed his work for a long time and met him once: a difficult man and a wonderful artist.

The trailer promised another round of Russian misery, and I've had enough of that. To my surprise what came out was a literary, religious story that would sit comfortably beside Dostoevsky. Read the synopsis and see for yourself: it's almost a straight "Gentle Creature."

A blind girl (Vasilisa Denisova), an absolute angel, marries a wealthy tyrant (Maxim Sukhanov) so that he'll pay for the operation to restore her sight. Her sight comes back very near the start. Everything after that is torment, horror and the plain foulness of the reality we live in.

In most other Russian films it all runs to a predictable formula. Here, for all the roughness of the camerawork, there's some pull to it that's hard to name — the painfully beautiful shots, or the black humour that helps you through the horror.

Sukhanov gives the best performance in Russian cinema of at least the past year. He gets everything most repellent and frightening into one man, without leaving the smallest opening for a happy ending. His face works equally well as the refined intellectual of Lopushansky's previous film and as the blunt merchant here.

What makes the story unusual is that it sits outside time altogether, which may also be its weakness, the director having stripped out every marker of the present on purpose. Even so the locations felt oddly familiar to me — I recognised a couple of them.

The second and central part belongs to the newcomer Vasilisa Denisova. Some will criticise her; to me she met everything the part asked. She also happens to perform with us, at the Social-Art Theatre. Lopushansky always casts well — in "Ugly Swans" a very young Laura Pitskhelauri had her first substantial screen role.

The rest of it — the symbols, the colours, the light — is thought through and rhythmically composed, and the aftertaste of a strong film stayed with me all the next day. Pleasant, and cruel with it: expect violence, on screen and past it. Though how it lands depends on how far this world has already worn your soul down.