for this week’s TRIBUNE : ‘How I Ended This Summer’ [6/10]; ‘Sweetgrass’ [5/10]

Published on: April 23rd, 2011

How I Ended This Summer
Director: Alexei Popogrebsky

Sweetgrass
Directors: Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Of all the major European film-making nations, Russia is perhaps – proportionally speaking – the least represented in terms of UK distribution. The country’s annual movie output is sizeable and eclectic, ranging from bombasting flag-waving historical epics (which would be more likely to repel than attract British moviegoers) to micro-budget exercises in envelope-pushing phantasmagoria. But since the death of Andrei Tarkovsky in 1986, only Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark, The Sun, Alexandra) has been the only Russian auteur whose works regularly make it into our arthouses.

Several of his compatriots are, at the very least, deserving of similar acclaim: as has been noted on these pages over the last few months, Svetlana Proskurina’s Truce and Alexander Mindadze’s sadly topical Chernobyl evocation Innocent Saturday are among the most outstanding features on the world’s film-festival circuit just now, but neither has much squeak of distribution here. It’s a most regrettable state of affairs, one which the BFI’s upcoming Russian-cinema extravaganza will hopefully go some way to remedying.

In the meantime, we can make do with Alexei Popogrebsky’s How I Ended This Summer, a solid – if unspectacular – example of serious-minded contemporary Russian cinema, one that was garlanded with three prizes at last year’s Berlin Film Festival: Silver Bears for Best Actor to Grigoriy Dobrygin and Sergei Puskepalis, and one for the cinematography by Pavel Kostomarov.

And the film is very much an actors’ and cinematographer’s showcase: set on a bleakly beautiful island in the Russian Arctic, it’s a thing of vast skies, cobalt seas and rugged terrains, dotted with evidence of human habitation. Dobrygin and Puskepalis are the only humans on view – the former is Pavel, a twentysomething student spending some of his summer holidays helping out at the remote weather station where Sergei (Puskepalis) has been resident for some time.

When Sergei goes off on a fishing trip, Pavel receives some very bad news about his colleague’s family back home on the mainland – but to say that he botches the difficult job of passing on this information would be a considerable understatement. Misunderstanding piles upon understanding – to a degree that tips over into melodrama at at least one juncture – as the two men find themselves in a battle against each other and against their hostile environment: while they’re the only humans around, they don’t lack for two-legged company, in the form of an ambling but lethal polar bear…

How I Ended This Summer is, by its nature, a film about extremities – about life at the very ends of the earth, where a small mistake can yield fatal consequences. Communication is crucial, central to the weather-station’s raison d’etre, and its breakdown is, as we see disastrous.

The film is of chief interest as a dramatisation of how a “new” Russia – and New Russians – are emerging from, and uneasily co-habiting with, representatives of “bygone” times: symbolised by the generation clash between gnarled fiftyish Sergei and callow lad Pavel (the title comes from the former amusingly mocking the latter that he’s only out in the Arctic in order to gain valuable experience for his CV, and to provide exciting tales for his fellow students back home.) And the choice of location and subject are undeniably, refreshingly original – just a shame director-writer Popogrebsky can’t quite make his mind up whether he’s crafting a tense psychological investigation or a violent, doom-laden thriller, an indecision which becomes somewhat wearing as we see it played out over two full hours…

There’s also plenty of time for rumination during Sweetgrass, an intriguing but ultimately overly-demanding portrait of rural Montana that concentrates four-square on sheep and their herders. Indeed, admirers of the four-legged ovines who reckoned the critters were somewhat sidelined by the human protagonists in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) will have no such qualms here.

Part of an ambitious, ongoing, multi-section academic project by co-directors Barbaish and Castaing-Taylor, it’s the first to venture beyond art-galleries or installation-spaces and into cinemas. The route to UK distribution has, however, been a long and meandering one: Sweetgrass premiered in its current form at the Berlin Film Festival back in 2009.

Such a “leisurely” pace is entirely in keeping with the subject-matter, of course: Castaing-Taylor and Barbash spent several years among the folk of Sweet Grass County, Montana, using video cameras to intimately record everyday details of their activities. Dividing editing and camerawork duties, they’ve crafted an unadorned, empathetic and patient study of rural lives that’s also a gruff elegy for a dying industry.

In a touch that – like several aspects of the enterprise – recalls Yu Guangyi’s superior Chinese variant Timber Gang (2007), end-titles inform us that we’ve been watching the last time that this area’s sheep were transported from low to high ground for summer grazing. It’s an arduous activity that drives one of the herders beyond breaking-point: frustrations are vented in an extended, entertainingly expletive-studded rant whose vehemence would make even Wayne Rooney blush.

There are several other sequences that engage, illuminate and/or startle, but these are, in the end, too few and far between. And the evident practical advantages of standard-issue digital-video (on what must have been a notably tough “shoot”) are outweighed by the resulting visuals, which are too often functional rather than inspired. This kind of arcadian subject-matter and sublime terrain cries out for high-definition DV or, ideally, 35mm.

The directors succeed, meanwhile, in evoking the sedentary, unhurried rhythms of country life all too well – many shots and sequences drag on unproductively and repetitively, crying out for further “shearing.” And though we’re theoretically close to the kind of terrain explored over recent decades in the seminal US-landscape cine-essays of James Benning (Ten Skies, 13 Lakes, The California Trilogy), Barbaish and Castaing-Taylor lack his formal rigour and structuralist wit. The end result may be that, for some less-than-engaged viewers, watching Sweetgrass could turn out to be “counting sheep” in more ways than one.

Neil Young
12th April, 2011
written for the 21st April edition of Tribune magazine