Ben Whishaw in Biopic of Russian Writer

Reflecting the peculiarities and contradictions of the person who offers the movie its title, Limonov: The Ballad is a wierd, stilted, creative, kaleidoscopic, difficult, imaginative and — above all, and maybe solely deliberately — irritating biopic of the Russian poet-punk-prisoner-gadfly-neo-Fascist Eduard Limonov (né Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko in 1948). To paraphrase the novelist Julian Barnes’ assessment of Emmanuel Carrere’s sort-of novel, sort-of biography on which this movie is loosely primarily based, Limonov: The Ballad is a piece viewers could get pleasure from having seen greater than they’d get pleasure from seeing it.

It’s anyone’s guess what number of will make the precise effort to observe this 158-minute ramshackle romp a few man who, earlier than he died in 2020, applauded Russia’s annexation of Crimea and fought on the facet of the invaders in Ukraine’s Donbas and Donetsk areas. Limonov’s unsavory sympathies would doubtless flip off most Western viewers, other than the fearless followers of dramas about political monsters. (For that area of interest constituency, this might make a high-quality double invoice with Aleksander Sokurov’s Hitler pic Moloch.)

You’ll assume Russia could be Limonov’s pure market, provided that the topic is understood principally in his motherland (and a bit in France, because of Carrere), which can be the homeland of the movie’s director Kirill Serebrennikov (Tchaikovsky’s Spouse). However this hasn’t a cherry popsicle’s probability in hell of being proven inside fewer than 500 miles from Moscow for all method of causes — beginning with the scenes during which its protagonist (performed by Ben Whishaw talking solely in English with a theatrical “raa-shun” accent) has soft-core homosexual intercourse. Additionally, Serebrennikov spent three years underneath home arrest in Russia till only in the near past on in all probability trumped-up fraud fees, and has since emigrated to France. In order that makes legit distribution again residence unlikely.

Even the writer-director who originated the venture, Academy Award-winner Pawel Pawlikowski (Chilly Struggle), reportedly determined to not go forward with directing it as a result of he discovered he actually didn’t like the principle character, or at the very least not sufficient to make a movie about him. Pawlikowski’s identify stays on Limonov: The Ballad, giving him credit score for the screenplay together with British writer-director Ben Hopkins (37 Makes use of for a Lifeless Sheep) and Serebrennikov and itemizing him as one of many govt producers. It’s a tempting thought experiment to marvel what Pawlikowski would have executed with the fabric given the finesse with which he contracted the very long time span of Chilly Struggle and his incisive knack for depicting the fractured psychology of Soviet-era expats, refuseniks and colluders in each that latter movie and Ida.

As a substitute, we now have a piece that could be very recognizably Serebrennikov’s, which is to say it’s nostalgic for the Soviet period, outlandishly celebratory of the callow charms of bohemian youth (examine along with his pop-music-themed Leto), saggy to the purpose of undisciplined (see Petrov’s Flu) and filled with lengthy, fluid, roaming, handheld single takes (relevant to just about all his works).

These bravura lengthy takes are deployed continuously, accompanied by spectacular crowd choreography to indicate Limonov and mates actually shifting by means of the years like rooms in a crowded constructing and close by metropolis streets — locations teeming with knick-knacks and detritus that evoke particular years and historic milestones, equivalent to a TV set displaying footage of a state funeral or the Berlin Wall coming down. These connective sequences are certainly spectacular and evoke Serebrennikov’s roots in avant-garde theatre, however do they should be soundtracked to Lou Reed songs like “Stroll on the Wild Facet” fairly so typically?

Summarizing the plot of Limonov, and subsequently the broad contours of its hero’s life, dangers frightening incredulity and but may set off drowsiness, however right here goes. After a prologue displaying a middle-aged Eddie having returned to Moscow from years in exile and explaining his new-found nationalism at a press convention, the movie just about works by means of his biography chronologically. Skipping the childhood stuff, the story will get going with Eddie or Edik as a younger manufacturing unit employee and poet manqué in Kharkiv, Ukraine, within the Nineteen Sixties after a rocky hoodlum section which noticed him getting despatched by his mother and father to a psychological hospital. (That stuff is roofed in Alexander Veledinsky’s Russkoye, a 2004 Russian adaptation of Limonov’s early writings.)

A dalliance with fellow literati-set denizen Anna (Masha Mashkova) successfully ends when Eddie hooks up with a magnificence supposedly “out of his league,” Elena (Viktoria Miroshnichenko). Eddie manages to woo her away from her earlier boyfriend by chopping his wrists on her doorstep, which by some means is interpreted as a grand romantic gesture. The previous certain is a distinct nation.

After many scenes displaying Eddie and Elena copulating in assorted positions, together with a spot of anal whereas watching Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on TV, the blissful couple find yourself emigrating to New York Metropolis, represented at first with a long-single-take tour round what seems to be like 42cd avenue when it was a hub for prostitution and porno theaters. However exile is tough on the 2 of them. Eddie doesn’t get the popularity for his genius that he thinks he deserves, and seethes with hatred for all the opposite Russian dissidents who’ve been embraced by the Western media — the aforementioned Solzhenitsyn, the poet Joseph Brodsky, physicist Andrei Sakharov and so forth.

Elena runs off with a photographer whom she gladly permits to penetrate her “in all her holes,” as she tells Eddie earlier than he tries to strangle her. Half out of curiosity and half out of self-abnegation, it could appear, he solicits an unhoused man (Alexander Prince Osei) to have intercourse with him, Limonov’s voiceover crowing all through about how stunning it’s to not solely be screwed however by a Black man at that. Then he turns into a butler for some time to an uptown millionaire (Tomas Arana).

Serebrennikov and Co. are so taken with the horny, sleazy 70s-ness of all of it that it seems like ages till the details take Eddie again to France at first after which to Moscow, the place he ultimately finally ends up beginning his personal bizarre nationalist, Soviet-nostalgic political get together after which will get despatched to jail. Some viewers, myself included, could really feel this again half is the extra attention-grabbing a part of Limonov’s story, one which Carrere’s e book covers in much less element. However simply when it looks like the movie has gotten higher, it ends with the compulsory what-happened-next textual content explanations earlier than the credit position.

No less than there aren’t any rostrum pictures flashed as much as reveal how a lot Whishaw seems to be like Limonov. Possibly as a result of the resemblance is poor — though Whishaw makes an effort to place flesh on the bones of the script — it’s a little bit of a chin-scratcher as to why he was solid. Positive, he’s fairly a protean actor, and one who has performed mentally disturbed and violent characters effectively (such because the protagonist of the disturbingly darkish Surge), however even he can’t fairly sq. the overlapping and concentric circles and proper angles of Limonov’s story to make one thing that hangs collectively right here.

No less than his hair, virtually a standalone performer in its personal proper, places on a pyrotechnic show of thespian ability, contorting itself into all method of tonsorial shapes as Limonov evolves from thug to hipster to skinhead superhero. Maybe the Cannes jury may think about a particular award for his hair by itself.