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4

2006, Movie, NR, 126 mins

4: Review

4 | CHETYRE
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The setup for Ilya Khrzhanovsky's debut feature is simple enough: Three total strangers meet in a Moscow bar, swap lies and go their separate ways. What follows is a nightmarish vision of contemporary Russia in which even the countryside, that venerable symbol of Soviet strength and purity, seems under a grotesque spell. The lies these strangers tell one another have nothing to do with who they really are: Prostitute Marina (Mariia Vovchenko) claims to be an advertising executive; Oleg (Yuri Laguta), a meat salesman, tells the others that he's a civil servant responsible for supplying the Kremlin with mineral water; and piano tuner Volodya (Sergei Shnurov) tells the most complex whopper of them all: He says he's a genetic engineer working on human cloning. Volodya's fish tale finally gets so outlandish that it offends Oleg, who pays his bill and leaves, putting an abrupt end to this impromptu gathering. Oleg returns home to the apartment he shares with his father, an obsessive-compulsive germophobe. After a dance at a disco and a chat about man's indeterminate nature, Volodya is picked up by the police, who've tied him to a vague but complicated crime involving a hooker and a hunchback. When Marina finally returns to her apartment at dawn, an answering-machine message notifies her that one of her three sisters, Zoya, is dead. Marina takes a train bound for the north and, after walking through muddy fields and foggy forests for what seems like hours, arrives at the raw and remote village where Zoya had been living with her boyfriend, Marat (Konstantin Murzenko). The town is populated by shockingly profane old crones who swill moonshine and make money by fashioning dolls out of rags and chewed bread, which Zoya would take and mold into the doll's faces. With Zoya dead and buried — she choked to death while chewing on a piece of bread — the old women are now worried that they'll starve unless Marat can help them. Very little directly connects these three story lines, aside from countless stray dogs that wander in and out of nearly every frame, as well as the constant appearance of the number 4, which recurs with an almost mystical regularity. Shot in fits and starts over the course of four years (there's that number again), Khrzhanovsky's film, written by acclaimed Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin, looks great but has a shambolic, off-kilter feel that might not be entirely intentional, and is alternately tedious and shocking: It ends with a horrifying final feast in which those awful village crones tear apart a roast pig, and then get naked — a moment that may put you off food, drink and grandmas for some time to come. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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