DOVLATOV

Russia, 2018, 126 minutes, Colour.

Milan Maric, Artur Beschastny.
Directed by Aleksey German Jr.


This is a film of major appeal to Russians, aficionados of Russian cinema, and those who live in northern Europe. To others, the settings may seem quite remote, distant. And Russia in 1971 may seem even more distant, the post Stalin and Kruschev era, the era of Brezhnev, the control of the bureaucrats, censorship.
This is a comparatively long film especially for the audiences who are not drawn into the situations in the characters. The focus is on a writer, brought up in past decades, married and divorced, with a daughter. He finds it difficult to get published, being rejected by most magazines having to make a living by writing for in-house magazines for factories, social stories, reporting of a propaganda film made for the factory. He loathes this experience.

The film also shows other writers, poets, artists, or feeling the suppression – and gathering in bars for entertainment, music, talk, comparing notes, comparing regrets and frustrations.

There is a particular colour tone to the film, not bright at all, suggesting some of the toning down of life in that era.

Most audiences will accept the film is fiction, the story of writers, poets and artists of the clamping down their experience. It also shows the bureaucrats, their views, interviews, threats. It is very much a period of socialist ideology. There is an emphasis on workers, factories, socialist issues.

It is only at the end of the film, with information given about one of the chief characters, Jack Brodsky, Russian poet, exiled to the United States, Novell literature prize winner in 1987, indicates to non-aware viewers that this is not exactly fiction.

In fact, the title character was real. However, his story doesn’t demand full attention. He seems rather self-centred, more than a touch narcissist at times, giving his views, not exactly a great listener to others or it is met with his ex-wife and his daughter, and communicate with his mother. But, one of the things we do not see him do, hear about only, is his writing.

So, it comes as rather a shock when the final information is given that he went to the United States, died in his late 40s and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, is considered one of Russia’s greatest writers. The film does not quite give the evidence for this – rather giving the difficulties is background and life in the 1970s and 1980s.