It’s a stretch to call Cannes award-winners disappointing. Disappointment is expected, and not only from recent years. Unhappily chosen international pics (though tending French) from unhappily chosen international juries, usually a Euro-centric mix of above-the-line film stalwarts of unknown critical distinction. This 2021 Grand Prix representative (that's the runner up spot) from Finnish writer/director Juho Kuosmanen unobjectionable at best. A Dogme style character piece about a directionless college gal, leaving her Moscow intellectual den to travel on her own after an older girlfriend bails, is off to see what she imagines is an important archeological site of early rock paintings. A long trip in a small sleeper compartment shared with a vodka-soaked Russian miner looking for a decent paycheck from his new job and maybe a quick pickup in this acceptable foreigner. Chalk and cheese from the start, various temporary add-ons make the accommodations even more unlivable, along with a lack of ablutions over three or four days (Yikes!) and that famous Ruskie service-with-a-smile attitude. (It makes Amtrak long-haul train conditions shine in comparison.) Halfway along the route to Murmansk, a more respectable traveler joins. Tall & handsome, a free-spirit with winning charm and unending guitar selections . . . whether you want to hear them or not. Russian jealousy rears its ugly head. But eventually, our Russian oaf turns out to be a decent sort at heart, a give-the-shirt-off-his-back bloke hiding behind clumsy nationalistic bluster; while the sophisticated Western tourist is revealed as a self-regarding/self-centered creep . . . and worse. It’s the kind of East/West reproachment storyline favored in Cold War days. And maybe we’re back there. (Even more since this film came out.) Nothing wrong with the set up, if you don’t mind close-quarters hand-held shooting strategies (those train corridors are murder), but there’s something disingenuous in presenting such hardwired characterizations & reveals as fresh stuff. And when we do get to the archeological site, the meaningless climax and fake human connection is a bit much to celebrate.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: While it’s always a bad idea to wish for the film someone didn’t make, there’s a real spark of comedy that largely goes missing when our student briefly gives up on her goal and settles for a hilariously boring, old-Soviet-school tour of a WWII museum honoring heroic patriots memorialized in displays of fading photos and small artifacts. But it would take a Russian, not a Finn, to pull off such black comedy . . . and it would never win any awards.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Not all so far away from Richard Linklater’s BEFORE SUNRISE/’95.
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