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A beautiful and poignant film that is full of
melancholy and madness and a fearful kind of hope. With the most beautiful
landscapes of vast nothingness which are at the same time full of metaphors,
ideas, desperation, revolution and ideals.
The most striking moment of the film and the most powerful in terms of
actual reality and a hark back to a difficult Russian period was the burning
of the old war camps, and the institutionalized women who had made it their
home and this on top of the vast nothingness/emptiness. This left them with
the option of ‘anywhere’ to go to make their new home and at the same time
nowhere.
The dialogue is full of philosophical ranting's, divine sentences and
mundane words spoken by the various characters. It was a constant barrage,
never letting up always something being said and it wasn’t important what it
was. Lives at risk and all of their hopes and dreams resting on the idea of
sending a man into orbit. An exciting, tedious and nerve racking time that
eventually extinguishes the life of the main doctor in charge of choosing
the fittest potential Cosmonaut and sending him to his potential burning
doom.
The tale told in a beautiful and at the same time harrowing and scary
setting. These were people who live at the ends of the earth and are
undertaking an impossibly complex task that would (or as it was perceived)
change the unsettled world they live in, a confused Russia struggling with
the release from the past.
The film could have taken a much more political stance and told more of the
history of Russia, but for me the tale of a few people at a crucial time was
much more insightful. Their words and phrases loaded with meaning,
philosophies and poetry and at the same time, empty, said as chant almost as
religious belief. Say it enough and it will happen. Words of love and wisdom
fear and hope, a new dawn a new Russia, intellectually spoken yet
meaningless once repeated. The profound statement needs profound timing and
divine inspiration, and the statements in the film are simply mantras. I
thought the film was so beautiful that I just followed the flow let it
happen. It would be foolish to try to follow each poignant moment
intricately and find depth and clarity in each sentence. I just enjoyed the
flow and the absurdity and the beauty.
03:09:2008
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di
Aliyah HUSSAIN