Also this issue:

Second Chances
Neil Jordan on his “double everything” remake of Bob Le Flambeur.
-Cindy Fuchs

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

New

Continuing

Repertory Film

Showtimes

April 17-23, 2003

movies

Pandora's Box

ALL ARK AND NO BITE: Sergei Dreidenâs Marquis looks to the past.

There’s not much inside Russian Ark.

by Sam Adams

No one who claims any interest in the art of film could fail to be excited by the news that Aleksandr Sokurov’s latest movie is genuine cinematic singularity -- an entire movie filmed in a single 90-plus-minute shot. ("Filmed" is not the strictly accurate term, since the images were captured on a specially designed hard drive, but you get the picture.) Indeed, some of the movie’s ecstatic reviews seem to have been based more on its technical achievements than its actual, whuddyacallit, art. I don’t seem to remember cinephiles getting quite so flustered over Mike Figgis’ Time Code, which, technically speaking, was Russian Ark times four, but then Time Code didn’t boast Russian Ark’s ostentatious opulence; Figgis’ aesthetic was gritty, fly-on-the-wall, while Sokurov stages his time-traveling film inside The Hermitage, the camera gliding past the arrayed throngs of Russia’s imperial past. Still, the movies are similar in one respect: Both Figgis and Sokurov expect audiences to be awed by their daring, to gape at their surmounting of self-imposed obstacles.

In Russian Ark, Tilman Büttner's camera floats like a specter through The Hermitage's halls, while a disembodied voiceover takes note of what it/we/the camera see. (The voice, dubbed in post-production, is Sokurov's.) Wafting through the entry on the wake of incoming ballgoers, the camera-ghost soon encounters a tall, slim figure clad in a high-collared black coat, with a vertical shock of snow-white hair. Played by Sergei Dreiden, the character is identified in the credits as "the Marquis," though the ghostly narrator refers to him as "my European" once it's determined that he's a European nobleman from the Napoleonic era. Together, mostly, the pair moves from room to room, encountering figures from Russian history (most of whose identities aren't clear until the closing credits), discoursing on art, history and the Russian character.

If this sounds like being stuck in the corner at a particularly boring cocktail party, well, you're not far off the mark. The Stranger's dialogue ranges from sweeping generalizations -- "Russians are so talented at copying because you have no ideas of your own" -- to off-the-cuff mumblings that frequently seem to float free of the speaker's body. (Lines that were forgotten or fumbled were overdubbed, due to the impossibility of starting a 90-minute "take" over again.) The ghost narrator's voiceover is ever more disconnected, often consisting of no more than vague natterings designed to smooth over the movie's slower passages. ("Rats a dog eternal people.") A far cry from the purposeful time-shifting of Béla Tarr or Hou Hsiao-Hsien (to name just two masters of the extended take), Russian Ark often seems to be merely spinning its wheels; the movie ends with six minutes of Büttner's camera descending an immense staircase. (Compared to a similar shot of villagers storming through a square in Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, Russian Ark's passage has no weight, not even a sense of scale, since video so reduces the weight of the image.) With its cast of thousands and elaborate choreography, Russian Ark is an impressive achievement, but it's more of an object than a movie.

Russian Ark

Written and directed by Aleksandr Sokurov A Wellspring release Opens Friday at Ritz Five