Playing the Victim

A Russian film set in Moscow. Valya was young and unemployed. Then he finds a strange job attached to the police. His task is to play the victim in reconstructions. While a suspect explains how he committed the crime, Valya lies on the floor, mimes being strangled, is stabbed, and the camera records it. He spends his days this way. In a flat, a restaurant, a swimming pool, a garden; each time dying as somebody else. Things are strange at home too. His father is dead, his mother is with his father's brother, and Valya knows it. His father's ghost appears to him. From there the film lays two texts over each other. While the reconstructions go on, Valya's own life settles into the shape of Hamlet, and the narrative does not hide it. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but indifference: Valya reacts to nothing, cares about no death, and the film presents this as the condition of a generation. The reconstruction scenes are shot like documentary. The suspects speak in their own words and the language is close to that of real statements. A police officer's speech is its best known section. He delivers a long, furious speech in a canteen, a hard tirade about the state of the country, shot almost in a single take. The tone is mixed. The narrative wanders between comedy and heavy drama and some scenes turn into animation. The film won the main prize at the Rome Film Festival. Yuriy Chursin, Vitaliy Khaev and Aleksandr Ilyin Jr are in the cast. Kirill Serebrennikov directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes contemporary Russian cinema that plays with form. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to attach to a character; the central figure is deliberately empty and the film offers no resolution to that anywhere.