August 7-13, 2003

movies

Communication Breakdown

Three on a match: Anni (Anni-Kristiina Juuso) watches over Ivan (Viktor Bychkov) and Veiko (Ville Haapsalo).

Talking creates more problems than it solves in the WWII-set The Cuckoo.

by Sam Adams

The Cuckoo begins in confusion, without words. A man is shackled to a treeless rock by men with guns; they seem to know him, but their uniforms are different than his. Though he wears the clothes of an SS officer (which might give us a sense of time, and perhaps place), he speaks to them in a language that doesn’t sound like German, and his fervent desire to free himself from the perfect sniper post they’ve chained him to seems decidedly un-Teutonic. For a long stretch, though, we have little else to go on. The antiquated rifle they’ve left him -- presumably less to defend himself than to make him a target -- is useless in severing the chain that binds him, so instead he starts a fire with the lenses of his glasses, trying to weaken the steel spike holding him captive. By the time he finally does break free, after having used every crude tool at his disposal, it’s as if you’ve just watched man discover fire.

Though the story of the man on the rock, whom we eventually learn is a Finnish soldier named Veiko (Ville Haapasalo), is interspersed with that of another, a Russian soldier named Ivan (Viktor Bychkov) who's been arrested for betraying his comrades, it's Veiko's wordless struggle that dominates the movie's first section, a reminder both of how hard it is to understand another without the benefit of language, and still, how much can be accomplished without it. In The Cuckoo, perspective is always limited, filtered through the imperfect eyes of its characters. When the soldiers holding Ivan prisoner are killed, mistakenly bombed by one of their own planes, we only see the explosion's aftermath, slowly unveiled as Anni (Anni-Kristiina Juuso), a Lapp woman whose cabin lies nearby, surveys the wreckage, looking for survivors. By omitting the explosion itself, writer/director Alexander Rogozhkin removes the spectacle of destruction, focusing instead on its repercussions. Anni comes across one dead man, then another, then Ivan, who seems at first like he might be dead as well. It's left to us to imagine how he might narrowly have escaped death, and it's doubtful the imagined scenario will be a heroic one.

The three characters, Russian, Lapp and Finn, are eventually brought together at Anni's home, which she tells the men has been empty for four years since her husband was pressed into service. Not that they understand a word she says, any more than she understands them. Observing that Veiko needs a wash, Anni observes, "All men smell of iron and death now." Seeing her hands fan the air around him, Veiko thinks he understands: "Yeah, lots of midges."

The misunderstandings between the men threaten graver consequences: Seeing Veiko's uniform, Ivan is convinced he's a fascist, and actually tries to stab him with one of Anni's knives, though both men are too weak to manage any kind of a fight.

Understandings eventually begin to develop, though the linguistic obstacles remain firm. When Ivan becomes jealous of the attention Anni shows the younger, more attractive Veiko, Anni is convinced Ivan's ill humor is due to the fact that he's eaten mushrooms, an act which she considers tantamount to suicide. (No worries, though; she soon whips up an herbal potion which clears the mushrooms, and everything else, out of Ivan's system.)

Of course, language isn't the only barrier between the three. Ivan tries to convince Veiko that his intentions are benign by quoting the titles of literature at him: "Tolstoy, War and Peace! Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms!" But the rough-hewn Ivan shows as little comprehension of the name of his country's celebrated novelist as of its Finnish title. Even if Veiko spoke fluent Russian, it's doubtful they'd be able to trade observations on Tolstoy. Anni, on the other hand, chides the men for their pale skin and habit of washing too frequently, which she's convinced is the reason for their ill health. Subsisting on her own, corralling fish from a nearby stream, Anni's life seems as far removed from the realities of war as are the souls of her guests.

Unlike Rogozhkin's Checkpoint, which played here a few years back, The Cuckoo doesn't push too hard for its lessons, and it retains a fabulous, slightly unreal quality, reinforced by its frankly impossible ending. The sheer abstraction of its setting might dampen its effectiveness as an antiwar allegory (not to mention that fact that it's set during the one war that virtually no one opposes), but it only increases its humanist resonance. Rather than suggesting words as an antidote to war, Rogozhkin suggest that words are what get us into trouble in the first place. Only silence can get us out.

The Cuckoo

Written and directed by Alexander Rogozhkin A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz East

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