Synopsis
St Petersburg, the start of the 20th century. Widowed engineer
Radlov lives with his daughter Liza and maid Grunia, whose brother
Johan is a pornographer. Aided by his henchman Victor Ivanovich,
Johan trades in flagellation scenes taken by photographer Putilov.
Another customer is Daria, the maid of Dr Stasov, who lives with his
blind wife Ekaterina Kirillovna and their adopted Siamese twins
Kolia and Tolia. Johan proposes marriage to Liza, but is driven out
by her father. Radlov tells Grunia he has changed his will in her
favour; she shows him Liza's collection of spanking photos which
induce a fatal heart attack.
Victor Ivanovich visits the Stasov apartment and forms an erotic
bond with Ekaterina Kirillovna. Radlov's will stipulates that until
Liza marries, Grunia will administer his estate. Johan moves into
the Radlov apartment with his beloved old nanny, who plays the
dominatrix in the pictures. Victor Ivanovich starts photographing
the twins. The pornographers acquire a cinematograph and film Liza
being spanked. Johan is visited by an angry Stasov and shoots him
dead. He and Victor Ivanovich move the twins into the Radlov home
and launch them on a singing career. Kolia becomes Liza's lover,
while Tolia takes to drink. Ekaterina Kirillovna is spanked in the
gang's next film. When his nanny dies, Johan has an epileptic fit
and the twins shoot Victor Ivanovich dead. Tolia later dies of
drink. Liza heads for the west, where Putilov is now a celebrated
film-maker.
Review
St Petersburg-based director Aleksei Balabanov has had his most
conspicuous success - both in Russia and on the festival circuit -
with the gangster film Brother (also reviewed in the May
issue of Sight and Sound), which was vociferously attacked by
film-maker Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt by the Sun) for its
apparently amoral stance towards the new criminal economy. Balabanov
is clearly a genuine troublemaker, but in ways the relatively
realistic Brother doesn't begin to suggest. In Of Freaks and
Men, he combines luridly perverse subject matter - pornography,
madness, the sex life of Siamese twins - with a style that draws
both on Russian literary fabulism and on early-cinema pastiche.
This coolly grim black comedy marks a return to Balabanov's
musings on film history in his short Trofim in which a
homicidal peasant accidentally stars in an early newsreel. While
clearly an impassioned citizen of the celluloid republic, Balabanov
has no illusions about film's civilising potential. Cinema's
advocate here is the naive and doomed Radlov, who preaches to
Putilov about the great new form's ability to "reveal truth to the
common folk." But film here proves to be a medium entirely of
artifice, as demonstrated by Sergei Astakhov's sepia photography,
cloaking the world in a sulphurous aura of archaism. Nor is film
anything but corrupting, a medium for spreading the moral and sexual
malaise affecting most of the characters from the start: the
medium's viral power is betokened by the proliferating armies of
bowler-hatted men with chequered travelling bags, who finally prove
to be porn-director Putilov's core audience.
The future of cinematography in Balabanov's vision of the 1900s
lies in the hands of exploitative pimp-pornographers, and Putilov,
the supposedly idealistic young poet of the new form, is a fop and a
coward. The film's cruellest irony is its payoff: we first see
Putilov in the west, a star director pursued by admiring young
women, then realise he has achieved this auteur status purely on the
strength of his spanking shorts.
Described in this way, Of Freaks and Men may seem a
moralist's film. In fact, it's a conte moral, with all the
ironic perversity that implies. Everyone is revealed as a 'freak' of
some kind. The story's innocents, the two gentle Chekhovian families
destroyed by Johan, are from the start weak and riddled with strange
passions: the feckless Stasov is loathed by his wife, who
immediately yields to the sound of Victor Ivanovich's lascivious
rasp; Radlov is smitten with his maid, while his virginal daughter
can't get enough of blackmarket flagellation photos. The true
innocents are the Siamese twins Kolia and Tolia, but even they are
easy prey to drink and their own naïveté. The demonic corrupters are
fatally weak too. Victor Ivanovich harbours an ambivalent curiosity
about the twins, while the apparently psychopathic Johan is brought
low by his attachment to his half-senile nanny, who ludicrously
stars as the no-nonsense dominatrix of his films.
Of Freaks and Men may seem morbidly negative, mistrustful
of everyone: the feckless nobs, the treacherous underclass and the
corrupting foreigners (a prologue shows Johan passing through
emigration into St Petersburg). The dream of western freedom is
undermined from the start. Liza's hopes are evoked by leitmotif
shots of a train seen from her window, but her orgiastic train
journey to the west is soon followed by depressive drifting through
leaf-blown streets.
Balabanov is, in a sense, doing a service to the history of
Russian cinema, rescuing it from its onerous reputation for
ideological high-mindedness. He fairly exhaustively drags the high
canon of Russian cultural values down to cinema's level, enlisting
the music of Prokofiev and Musorgsky, and revealing Petersburg's
most grandiose buildings as hiding murky subterranean secrets.
Victor Ivanovich walks down a sweeping marble stairway that narrows
from shot to shot, leading to the cellar where the gang produces its
wares. The film is an outstanding essay on city architecture,
especially in its exploration of Petersburg's waterways, with
Johan's final journey more akin to a funeral trip.
Russian literature has a long tradition of the arcane and abject,
and Balabanov's real precursors here are writers such as Gogol,
Bulgakov (in the diabolical mode of The Master and Margarita)
and Andrei Bely, in his modernist panorama Petersburg. Most
of all, Of Freaks and Men is Dostoevskian, with Johan an
archetypal wanderer from the west and an epileptic, albeit no holy
fool.
Despite the sepia photography, the period dressing and the wry
intertitles, the film only takes its early-cinema pastiche so far.
Balabanov is more concerned to develop his own style of melancholy
grotesque, which has its closest affinities with David Lynch (this
film is to the Tsarist drawing room what Blue Velvet was to
small-town suburbia) and Peter Greenaway, with its symmetries,
doublings and highlighted artifice. Balabanov has a particular
genius for faces, and the casting is flawless, from the maidenly
blankness of Dinara Drukarova as Liza, to Sergei Makovetskii's
glacially dour Johan. Balabanov's regular star Viktor Sukhorukov is
especially memorable as Victor Ivanovich, his simian grin the true
stuff of nightmares.
Even Lynch and Greenaway have rarely left an audience with such a
bitterly ironic punchline. Liza, left drifting in the west, purges
her melancholy with a spanking session at the hands of an
androgynous, rather anachronistic leather boy: you can't escape
either your conditioning or your libido. Nor can you get away from
the fate of film: Johan, the would-be mogul, may have met his
downfall, but celluloid sleaze is very much the coming thing. As
Johan drifts down the Neva on his ice floe, half Frankenstein, half
defeated Aguirre, we pretty much know what's in store: the rest is
20th-century cinema history.
From www.bfi.org.uk
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