4 – Chetyre (2005)

Directed by: Ilya Khrzhanovksi | 126 minutes | drama | Actors: Marina Vovchenko, Yuri Laguta, Sergei Shnurov, Konstantin Murzenko, Irina Vovchenko, Svetlana Vovchenko, Shavkat Abdusalamov, Anatoli Adoskin, Aleksei Khvostenko, Andrei Kudriashov

We westerners understand very little about “the Russian”. At least, from the stereotypical image we have of “the Russian”: brave, clumsy, alcoholic, melancholy or even simply depressed. Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who wrote the script together with the provocative writer Vladimir Sorokin, makes little effort in ‘4’ to disprove this cliché. After all, every cliché contains a large kernel of truth. Based on this, ‘4’ paints an intense and depressive picture of the desolate state in which the Russian soul finds itself today.

Russia has become a country where the common man will have to find his way entirely on his own, and where nobody seems to care about the desolate, nocturnal and muddy environment in which one lives. The Russian leads the life of a mutt, seems to be the motto of ‘4’. And what else can you do than raise a glass to this again? For the same money you will be flattened the next day.

In ‘4’ three young Russians are followed, who try to drag themselves through this depressive society. The main character is the call girl Marina. One night she meets the other two main characters, Oleg and Volodja. Oleg is a meat trader who trades in old meat that has been pushed back and earns a lot of money from it. However, he tells the other two that he works in the Presidential Office at a department that controls the distribution of well water for the President and his staff. Volodja is a piano tuner but pretends to be a chemist working at a secret laboratory involved in a sixty-year project: people are cloned four times. Why four times? Because the fourth clone gives the best chance of viability. Four is the number of stability, according to Volodja. He seems to be the only one who is still somewhat optimistic in life, but, despite warnings, he will not be able to avoid fate either. Marina poses as the representative of a Japanese machine that makes workers calmer and more productive. The three people know that they are fooling each other, but the night time and the drinks consumed make them seem to take each other seriously. So serious that they break up with an argument.

After these nocturnal conversations, ‘4’ mainly follows Marina, who returns to her native village because her sister Zoya has passed away. There she finds herself in an absurd environment: an enlargement of a village such as there are probably enough in Russia. The village consists only of old grannies, babushkas, who keep themselves alive by making dolls. The face is kneaded from chewed breadcrumbs, a specialty of the toothless females. Zoya was the only young girl in the village, and she was the one who gave the dolls their own face. Her tragic and stupid death leaves the females and Zoya’s friends left behind hopeless with grief and fear of the future. Who makes the faces anymore? Marina is not the only visitor in the village. Her original family situation is frighteningly similar to Volodja’s made-up genetics story. In between Marina’s return, we sometimes see Oleg and Volodja. Oleg turns out to still live at home with his disturbed father who has a fear of contamination, and Volodya is arrested for something he claims he didn’t do. They too are directly or indirectly confronted with a reality that is even more absurd than their own drunken stories.

‘4’ is not an easy film: written to heaven by the film critics, but not exactly a film for the general public. The film certainly contains a story, but there is deliberately no clear line. The viewer follows the main characters, and especially Marina, just as restlessly as the camera does. The great focus on the absurdities of Russian life, from ’round pigs’ to squeaking and creaking noises, from ten-year-old mincemeat to the bare breasts of drunken babushkas, makes ‘4’ a sometimes difficult film for those who like the want to hold the line. However, once you’re willing to get involved in this vortex that opens into the Russian drain, you’ll be completely immersed in this depressing but very intense movie.

Sometimes ‘4’ suffers a little too much from “l’art pour l’art” and as a result the film becomes too pretentious and bloated: beautifully filmed, cleverly made, but superfluous. Most of the time, however, Khrzhanovsky cleverly strikes a balance between silly nonsense and impressive absurdity. The highlight in this regard is the journey from Marina to her native village: first the train journey with the sad-comic conversations between Marina and her peasant fellow travelers, then the restless walk through the desolate countryside to the village. ‘4’ seems like a typical postmodern film: a film without a clear story, let alone a message. A film that only contains subtle and less subtle clues to more content, but the viewer has to decide for himself what that content is. For example, there are constantly the running and howling street dogs. Where does the senseless drunken life of man end and the roaming existence of a stray dog ​​begin? This approach will be seen by some as too easy and too superficial, and perhaps somewhat justified. But the desolate and depressing reality of ‘4’ is in any case more real than the romantic or exciting fantasy of most films that appear in the cinema or on DVD.