Thursday, May 01, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Ark for art's sake

By Robert Chancey

"If God could do the tricks we do, he'd be a happy man."--Peter O'Toole in The Stunt Man

Cinema is an intoxicating and golden elixir. By embellishing the stagnant drudgery of our ordinary lives, it stretches the boundaries of the soul and transforms us all into pathological believers. Deception may be the common currency of con artists, but believable fabrications are the treasured totems of grateful moviegoers. We want fictional scenarios filtered through the prism of reality and we want plausible falsehoods to invigorate the banality of our dreary world.

Director Alexander Sokurov and co-screenwriters Boris Khaimsky, Anatoly Nikiforov and Svetlana Proskurina understand this yearning for chimerical transcendence, and with Russian Ark they have discovered a clever way to vault filmgoers into a celluloid netherworld of uncommon splendor. In a brave act of artistic liberty that many might mislabel foolish self-indulgence, Sokurov shot his entire film using a high-definition digital video camera in one glorious, extended take--a sweeping, 90-minute tour of St. Petersburg's opulent Hermitage museum. This syncopated ballet stumbles upon luminaries like Catherine the Great and Nicholas and Alexandra, and anonymous but memorable figures like a blind woman captivated by marble sculptures and deeply religious paintings.

It's an ingenious stunt that will guarantee Russian Ark a place in film history, but the movie would only merit a footnote if its content did not match its technical audacity. Sokurov has wed his cinematic trickery to a weighty, potentially pretentious theme: the history of the modern Russian state--from the era of Peter the Great to the present--and the sorrows and ambitions of the Russian soul reside within the walls of the Hermitage.

(Though startlingly original, the film has noteworthy antecedents: Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, with its 10-minute takes; The Red Violin, a film equally passionate about the glorious deliverance of priceless objets d'art; and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, a book-length paragraph that threatens to continue for eternity.)

Potentially soporific and abstract, the film yearns for the heavens but does not ignore the whimsical folly of the earth's most quixotic residents. (Like HAL, the supercilious computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, this technically adroit creation has a tangible humanity.) As cinematographer/Steadicam operator Tilman Buttner strolls through the Hermitage's cavernous rooms, Sokurov mumbles reveries about Russia's tragic history. His melancholy is juxtaposed with the haughtiness of a gaunt, black-clad stranger (Sergei Dreiden), who claims to be a 19th century French diplomat. This preening figure punctures the narrator's philosophizing, but is transfixed by the people he meets and the myriad masterworks that beckon him through the immaculate rooms. By the conclusion, he is waltzing with aristocrats and giggling foolishly; his smile has a consecrated glow. And though the gloomy, unseen narrator cannot define his strange journey--is it a disruptive dream or an extended vision?--he feels certain that salvation resides within these imperial walls. Sokurov believes artistic beauty can humble, inspire and redeem us, and what viewer will dare argue with him at the end of this vibrant journey?

On a purely mundane level, Russian Ark is a gorgeously shot commercial for a museum that houses stunning antiquities. But on a more profound level, the movie celebrates artistic endeavors as permanent artifacts documenting the human desire to seek perfection. Sokurov's lyrical pipe dream ponders timelessness and the grandeur of artistic immortality. It is a spiritual quest that will induce rapture.