|
|
JUSTIN TANNER REVIEWS COMPARTMENT No. 6
Quick relationship question: If your partner talked you into taking a trip to the Arctic Circle so you could look at petroglyphs together in the middle of Winter (archeology being THEIR area of interest, not yours) and then suspiciously bowed out at the last minute while encouraging YOU to go ahead anyway — which meant that you’d spend days and days on a train, by yourself, heading for the ends of the Earth — would you be suspicious? I think I might be. But naive and sweet college student, Laura (played with layers of emotional resonance by Seidi Haarla) has no qualms (or few qualms, anyway) about saying goodbye to her lover and her lover’s fancy Moscow apartment in order to sit in a claustrophobic train compartment with a total stranger, headed for a place she has only a marginal interest in visiting.
Nonetheless, she wants an opportunity to practice speaking Russian (she’s a Finnish Ex-Pat) and (more importantly), to impress her sophisticated professor girlfriend — whose snobby intellectual friends refer to her as a “lodger” (their lesbian relationship being a secret) — and so she packs a duffel bag and a video camera and boards a shoddy passenger train for the twelve hundred mile journey (roughly the distance from San Diego to Seattle). But from the second she enters the titular “Compartment No. 6” and meets her boorish, day-drinking lout of a cabin-mate, Lyokha (the constantly surprising Yuri Borisov), the grim realization of her monumental error lands on Laura like a falling brick.
This man, who’s so blotto he can barely speak, leers and shouts and refuses to recognize Laura’s attempts to put up a wall of privacy between them. He’s so keen on invading her space — he flatly ignores the fact that she’s listening to a Walkman and trying to read a book — that Laura has no choice but to spend the entire day in the dining car. And when she returns to the compartment, Lyokha is somehow even drunker, pushier and louder than before; the room is thick with clouds of cigarette smoke and when she retreats to her bunk to try and sleep, he insists and insists (and insists!) that she come back down and film the snow storm that is raging just outside the train window. It’s the nature of the film, and of the unrelenting, nearly maddening insistence of director Juho Kuosmanen (”The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki”), to push Laura (and by extension, us) up to — and eventually past — the breaking point.
In fact, when Lyokha hides in the connecting passage between train cars so he can jump out and terrify the unsuspecting Laura — which is on my short list of unforgivable acts — I was ready to say “Check, please”, and jump off Kuosmanen’s Arctic-bound train. Luckily, magically, and just in the nick of time, a shift occurs onscreen, driven by a series of unassuming events that begin chipping away at Lyokha’s bravado and Laura’s defensive stance, and move the story in a totally new direction. And as the ice melts, and she smiles for the first time, and he finally shuts up and listens, they start to connect. And a tentative friendship forms. A friendship that blossoms into a very real (and ultimately heartrending) romance. “Compartment No. 6,” is the sweetest surprise of the year. A love story between two radically incompatible people. And like watching a magician set up a trick that your rational mind KNOWS is impossible, director Kuosmanen — through cinematic bravado, a script built from small beautiful gestures, and two brilliant actors giving everything they’ve got — manages to pull a romantic rabbit out of a 90’s-era ushanka, a Russian fur hat.
The movie is full of incorrect first impressions. From the surly train conductor, to the frumpy ‘old lady’ living with her cat in the middle of nowhere, to the guitar playing traveler who shows up halfway into the movie: everyone leads with a defining characteristic only later revealing, gorgeously, the multi-dimensional human being underneath. Kuosmanen’s decision to forgo a soundtrack (using only songs played on the radio for musical accompaniment) lets us fully immerse ourselves in the delicate play of emotion between the leads. Hurt, longing, laughter, remorse and (eventually) a searing, soul-burning passion are allowed to land, filter-free, with no assist from a busy orchestra or emotive, percolating synth. And what a relief to have a film set prior to the ubiquitousness of cellphones: When Laura finally arrives in Murmansk, there is no Google search or Siri to help her out, she has to actually work (and work hard) to locate the petroglyphs that initiated her journey. Consequently, when Laura and Lyokha become separated, there is no quick phone call to help them find each other again. They need ingenuity, multiple taxis and lots of trial and error. Effort has to be made.
Which is ultimately the theme of the movie: How far WOULD you go to prove your love? The ends of the Earth? It’s a beautiful metaphor. The final moments of “Compartment No. 6”, like everything in the film, leave enough room for our imagination to go where Kuosmanen — a consummate artist — is too marvelously subtle to shorthand for us. We may not get a lover’s clinch, a sweeping score and a vertiginous crane shot. But it’s an unforgettable ending all the same. And one that is no less emotionally devastating for all its well earned restraint. STREAMING ON AMAZON PRIME
|
|
