Whispering Pages

A man with no name moves through corridors and stairwells left to rot in the fog. Along the way he meets people who have been crushed and humiliated: a woman, a clerk, nameless crowds. The speech comes in whispers. Where he is, what he is looking for, and which century he is in never become clear. Aleksandr Sokurov's film feeds on nineteenth-century Russian literature, and on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in particular. It is not an adaptation: Sokurov throws out the novel's plot and its argument and keeps the feeling of guilt and hopelessness. The image is darkened, the sound pressed down. Viewers looking for a story will find it hard; it asks to be watched like a poem.