Kak ya provyol etim letom
Alexei Popogrebsky (2010)
Two men – one in his twenties, the other about forty – work at a meteorological station on an Arctic island. (The filming was done at the Valkarkai polar station on the Chukchi Sea in Arctic Russia.) The place is deeply isolated: Pavel and Sergei are stuck there with just each other for company, apart from the voice at the other end of the radio link when they’re filing their reports, and the landscape. And the viewer is stuck with them, and the landscape – which is really breathtaking, because its beauty is so vastly implacable. The composition of the images, photographed by Pavel Kostomarov, and their colour-grading – the first time I remember seeing a credit for this (for Kirill Bobrov) – is superb. There are wonderful shots of the land and sky darkening then moving into the light of the following day. It’s not just the spectacular aspect of the visuals that makes this such a good film to look at: details like fish, caught and smoked by Sergei and hanging on a line, are strong too. Vladimir Golovnitsky’s fine sound editing is similarly unnerving – the radio, the helicopter, the sea, the wind, creaking floors and doors. Dmitri Katkhanov’s score is played as music on Pavel’s walkman, as music inside the young man’s head – music which asserts his generational difference from Sergei and reminds him of a world outside the station. It’s not hard to sympathise with Pavel: this minutely observed film is a punishing match for its setting. I was always wanting it to end (and it is too long) but it’s an impressive piece of work.
How I Ended This Summer is about doing the wrong thing in the wrong place. Pavel (whom Sergei often calls Pasha) is alone on the station when news come through the radio link that Sergei’s wife and child have died in an accident. Pavel loses his nerve when Sergei returns and can’t bring himself to break the news. Nick Hasted suggested to the writer-director Alexei Popogrebsky in an S&S interview in May that this panicky oversight might not have mattered so much in a different environment, and Popogrebsky agreed. Pavel’s moral failure forces him into showing physical resourcefulness and daring: he eventually tells Sergei and, terrified that the older man will kill him, goes on the run in this arctic wilderness. The physical transformation of Pavel is one of the most remarkable I can remember seeing on screen. Grigory Dobrygin appears to age decades, his face hollowed out by what he experiences (when he and Sergei eventually part, Pavel is hunched with shame). The heavy-set, unsmiling Sergei comes to emotional life only when he’s responding to the text message from his wife, telling him that she and their child are going to visit him. (It’s that text that sends Sergei out fishing for arctic trout and so away from the station when news of his loved ones’ death comes through.) As the story develops, Sergei Puskepalis as Sergei uses his eyes – they express both threat and hurt – marvellously. It’s to the credit of the two actors, and Popogrebsky, that you root for both men equally – and, at the same time, feel infuriated by Pavel’s cowardice and nervous that Sergei is going to turn into the bogeyman that Pavel fears.
Pavel takes down the message about Sergei’s wife and child on a sheet of paper, which gets dropped on the floor shortly before Sergei’s return from his unauthorised fishing trip. Once he fails to tell Sergei what he needs to know, Pavel rushes back into their cabin to recover the message. This obvious melodramatic detail seems to come from a different kind of film – the too slow realisation of the voices down the radio link that Sergei’s still in the dark about his wife and child feels contrived too. Minimising the background information intensifies the material, and strengthens the starkness of the men’s situation and opposition. Even so, Popogrebsky would have done better to give us a clearer idea of why Pavel is working at the station in the first place. Do we take literally Sergei’s sarcastic remark which gives the film its title – ‘You just want to write a swanky essay “how I ended this summer”’ – and assume Pavel’s a student doing a dissertation of some kind? It seems unlikely: Pavel doesn’t seem to be, even before the going gets tough, an adventurous, game-for-anything spirit, the kind of young man who would opt for such extraordinarily arduous fieldwork. So is he simply a junior meteorologist who’s bored and a little careless in his work? It limits our understanding of Pavel’s later metamorphoses when we don’t quite know where he started from. (In any case, the title sounds more like an awkwardly-translated variant on a school child’s ‘what-I-did-on-my-summer-holidays’ than any more advanced education assignment.)
Popogrebsky’s obliqueness works very well at the end of the film, however. Pavel leaves the island – a helicopter arrives at last – and Sergei stays. Why does he stay? On a realistic level, I wasn’t sure; in psychological terms, it’s very clear. He belongs in this bleak place, through long experience of it and now that he’s lost the only people he loves: the end of the world is where Sergei lives. (This place is also full of radioactive material, which plays its part in the story.) It seems surprising at first that he doesn’t react more to the news of his wife’s and his child’s deaths, when Pavel eventually tells him. But only at first: you come to see Sergei as a man whose natural habitat is grim isolation and whose bereavement returns him to it.
27 April 2011
