Compartment No 6
Hytti nro 6
Juho Kuosmanen (2021)
Out of the frying pan … Laura (Seidi Haarla), a Finnish student studying in Moscow, is in a relationship with a Russian woman who’s her senior by some years and in academic status – Irina (Dinara Drurakova) is a university professor. At a gathering in her apartment, she and her clever friends play a gruesome game of who-said-that. Laura pluckily joins in but when she attributes a quote to Anna Akhmatova there are patronising smiles all round: it’s not only the wrong answer but Laura stresses the wrong syllable in the surname. Twenty-four hours later, she has embarked on a long rail journey to see the prehistoric rock carvings (petroglyphs) at Murmansk, north of the Arctic Circle. Irina was meant to accompany her but then decided she couldn’t spare the time; Laura shares the cramped train space that gives Juho Kuosmanen’s second feature its name with a very different travelling companion. Ljoha (Yuri Borisov), a Russian mine-worker, is uncouth, potty-mouthed and deliberately provoking. The table on his side of the compartment is piled with debris – orange peel, fag ends, empty bottles. He’s soon hitting on Laura, though she fends him off. She complains to the dour train guard, Natalia (Yuliya Aug), that she can’t sleep and asks to change compartment. Natalia doesn’t crack a smile but says Laura must be joking. She’s with Ljoha for the duration.
A Finn uncomfortably stuck in territory occupied by an aggressive Russian: Compartment No 6’s set-up has now acquired an uneasy political edge it didn’t have (though audiences in Finland may disagree) when the film premiered at last year’s Cannes festival. The screenplay, which Kuosmanen wrote with Andris Feldmanis and Livia Ulman, is inspired by a 2011 novel of the same name by the Finnish writer Rosa Liksom, set in the 1980s. Although some reviewers of the film are clear (thanks to press notes?) that Kuosmanen has moved the action forward by a decade to Russia in the early years of the Putin regime, the director told Sight & Sound (May 2022) that he didn’t want ‘to pinpoint the year it takes place’ and he manages that successfully. On the one hand, Laura listens to music on a Walkman and the conspicuous absence of mobile phones rules out a pre-mid-1990s setting. On the other hand, the draughty, dilapidated train, complete with restaurant car where most things are off the menu, connotes traditional screen depictions of the Soviet Union. Kuosmanen also told S&S that he wanted ‘to make the film so that you can almost smell [the train]. Unfortunately, the smell is pretty bad’. He succeeds in doing this, too.
Kuosmanen is turning out an eccentrically romantic film-maker. His first feature, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (2016), set out to quash viewer expectations of the sporting underdog story. It didn’t matter that the boxer hero was trounced in the climactic world title fight bout; he loved his girlfriend and she loved him. The film was engaging and well acted by the two leads but I thought it flawed, largely because it made use of – and, in order to make its point, distorted – real-life events. As a piece of fiction, Compartment No 6 doesn’t present similar problems but it’s still a tricky undertaking. Kuosmanen has described the film as ‘a love story’ and the storyline is rooted in romantic comedy tropes – two chalk-and-cheese people get off to a bad start together, start enjoying each other’s company, separate, meet again, and so on. How does the romance work, though, if Laura is lesbian and Ljoha an antisocial sex pest?
For a minority of critics, it doesn’t work. Compartment No 6 shared the Grand Prix at Cannes (with Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero), was long-listed for the International Film Oscar and has a 93% fresh rating (from 103 reviews) on Rotten Tomatoes but it’s worth noting what minority dissenting voices have to say. To be fair to Richard Brody (hard though that is), he dislikes the film for more reasons than that it ‘depicts a woman’s quick forgiveness of a sexual predator with whom she’s forced to associate’. The sarcasm of the rhetorical questions ending Martin Tsai’s piece for Critic’s Notebook – ‘So what’s the real lesson here? Don’t write off that drunk guy who sexually harasses you?’ – isn’t typical of the review as a whole. Even so, Tsai, like Brody, takes it as read that Ljoha’s sexist aggression is unforgivable. Until recent years, liberal critics (which I’m assuming these two to be) would probably have interpreted Ljoha’s personality and behaviour with reference to his background – cultural, socio-economic and historical. This has changed. Brody and Tsai cut Ljoha no slack for coming from the wrong side of the tracks or for living in the past (literally as well as figuratively). He’s as unequivocally culpable as Harvey Weinstein.
Although the two critics have a point when they suggest that romcom formula dictates the film at the expense of characterisation, I was happy to give Kuosmanen the benefit of the doubt on this. The strangers-on-a-train set-up has led to comparisons with Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) but the encounter in Compartment No 6 reminded me more of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). The ending of Before Sunrise, with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke deciding not to exchange contact information but to meet again in the same place in six months’ time, put down a marker for a sequel (albeit that, in the event, the couple met again in a different city after an interval of nine years). It’s essential to Lost in Translation, however, that Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, when they part company, go their separate ways for good. In a 2019 interview on IndieWire, Coppola said of her film, ‘For everyone, there are those moments when you have great days with someone you wouldn’t expect to. Then you have to go back to your real lives, but it makes an impression on you’. Kuosmanen hardly encourages you to feel that Laura and Ljoha have a future together. The transitory nature of the relationship makes it believable that they don’t find out everything about each other and is a reasonable pretext for Kuosmanen’s taking character development only so far.
The first, modest détente between the principals takes place in Petrozavodsk, where the train makes an overnight stop. According to Martin Tsai, Ljoha ‘invites [Laura] along for an excursion and, inexplicably, she joins him’. Tsai doesn’t mention that Laura repeatedly says no to the invitation; it’s only after she has called Irina from a phone box and been harassed by another man impatient to use the phone that Laura wearily capitulates. Ljoha drives her to the home of Lidia (Lidia Kostina), an elderly acquaintance (or relative?) of his, where they spend the night, in different rooms. This episode mostly comprises conversation between Laura and Lidia, with Ljoha reappearing next morning for the drive back to the railway station. Soon after the journey resumes, peaceful co-existence in compartment number six is interrupted when Laura invites Sasha (Tomi Alatalo), a fellow Finn who arrives on the train without a reservation, to share the compartment. It’s a kindly but misguided offer: Sasha plays and sings on his guitar, sends Ljoha into an abysmal jealous sulk and, when he leaves the train, steals Laura’s video camera, which contains her entire record of her life in Moscow.
Ljoha doesn’t suddenly slough off his boorish tendencies; nor did it seem to me that time spent in necessarily close proximity to him caused Laura to discover she was physically attracted to the opposite sex. When he first asks if she has a boyfriend, Laura, reasonably cautious, says yes. It’s only when her antipathy to Ljoha is less that she reveals her partner is female. Martin Tsai finds it objectionable that Laura ‘initiates physical intimacy with Ljoha. The film’s logic is that she’s in an emotionally vulnerable state and he’s the only one there for her, because Irina can’t even bother to muster up any excitement when Laura calls’. That summary understates and overstates what actually happens. Her Moscow lover does more than fail to ‘muster … excitement’ when Laura phones during train stops: Irina sounds thoroughly disengaged or, on one occasion, otherwise engaged – with someone else. A sense of being abandoned by her lover may well sharpen Laura’s feelings of isolation and make her thankful for the small mercy that Ljoha is gradually less objectionable and more vulnerable as the journey goes on. But it isn’t gratitude, let alone sexual desire, that propels her into holding him close: this ‘physical intimacy’ is, as much as anything, compassion for his evident unhappiness. As the train approaches Murmansk, they go to the restaurant car together to celebrate the imminent end of the journey. They’re told the restaurant is about to close and sandwiches are all that’s on offer but something worse seems to be eating at Ljoha and Laura hugs him. He breaks the embrace and heads back to their compartment. By the time Laura gets back there, he has cleared off.
Richard Brody deplores Compartment No 6 as anti-intellectual and anti-bohemian. The intellectuals in the film – Irina and her party guests – are too few to be remotely representative; the bohemians are a one-man-band (and that’s assuming Sasha is even meant to be ‘bohemian’). You might as well read the film as anti-bureaucratic on the basis of hatchet-faced Natalia and the reliably unhelpful waiting staff in the restaurant car. I’m sorry that this note has become preoccupied with a couple of negative responses to a mostly well-received film but the Brody and Tsai reviews have got under my skin – and not just because I disagree with most of their adverse criticisms: I also suspect they would have no problem with things in the picture that gave me pause. I didn’t believe it when Laura told Ljoha how much she loved every minute of the time she spent with Irina and her circle of friends (though it’s possible that Kuosmanen intends this as nostalgic wishful thinking on Laura’s part). I was surprised by Ljoha’s lack of reaction to the news that Laura was in a lesbian relationship. If his silence means consent, that strikes me as far more unlikely, for a working man of Ljoha’s generation and nationality, than for a young woman like Laura, three decades ago, to put up with male chauvinist insults and abuse.
Juho Kuosmanen’s anti-intellectualism is also betrayed, according to Richard Brody, in what happens after Laura reaches her destination. ‘The journey towards petroglyphs inspired high hopes’ because it brought to Brody’s mind Roberto Rossellini’s (I think very overrated) Journey to Italy (1954). ‘Yet even the grand humanistic reverberations of ancient artifacts leave Kuosmanen’s directorial gaze uninspired, even uninterested’, laments Brody – a master of inadvertently comical prose. By the time the train has limped into Murmansk and Laura has checked in at a hotel, the petroglyphs have been mentioned often enough to assume the proportions of a semi-humorous holy grail. Alas, it’s midwinter and Laura learns from the reception desk that a road journey to the site of the rock carvings is impossible at this time of year. Remembering the name of the company that employs him, she leaves a message for Ljoha at his workplace. He turns up in the hotel lobby, derides what the receptionist told Laura and gets a workmate to drive them, on alarmingly icy roads, to where the petroglyphs are.
Why does Ljoha help in this way? It isn’t (as Brody suggests it is) because the film turns him into a hero or because he realises his future is with Laura. Ljoha still refers to the carvings as ‘this crap’ but he knows how much viewing them means to her, and that this is something that he can make happen, for someone he has come to like. He knows, too, that it’s all he can do: the challenge of trying to sustain the friendship in the longer term is beyond him. Kuosmanen gets fine performances from his two leads. Her character’s verbal outbursts are few but Seidi Haarla, as well as making you root for Laura, expresses the accumulating weight of disappointment pressing down on her. With his tensile presence and sometimes ardent eyes, Yuri Borisov suggests a man compelled to keep his emotional distance from himself as well as others. During a train stop, Ljoha, on the station platform, plays a furious, futile game making and kicking snowballs. Inside the train, Laura watches and is much amused when his feet go from under him as he launches a kick. When he gets back on board and she mentions this to him, Ljoha flatly denies that he fell over.
Juho Kuosmanen does overdo the physical closeness of the couple during the climactic car journey – this looks to be more than huddling for warmth – and their bizarre, ecstatic relaxation in the arctic landscape. But the film’s ending is highly effective. Ljoha returns to work. His workmate chauffeur drives Laura off and she seems dismayed until he passes her a note from Ljoha, which brings a smile to her face Soon after they first met, Ljoha asked her the Finnish for ‘I love you’; she replied, ‘Haista vittu’ before explaining the phrase actually meant ‘Go fuck yourself’. On one side of the scrap of paper given to her in the car is the rudimentary pen drawing that Ljoha began in the train restaurant and quickly gave up on. On the reverse are the two Finnish words that Laura taught him. Ljoha has never found it hard telling people to fuck off. Laura realises this is as close as he’s likely to come to I love you.
12 May 2022