Lubov and Other Nightmares (Lubov i drugie koshmari, 2001)

Andrei Nekrasov

Russia

97 min, color and B&W, Russian (English subtitles)

Dreams are a tricky thing, especially if one wants to make a good film out of an entire sequence of them, particularly if it is from a country, with whose unique problems the American audience is not likely to be familiar. On top of it, most dreams are quite boring, and it does not matter how many weird women assassins, lesbian prison sex, or full-frontal you put in it, they still are boring. They just are, bad English accents notwithstanding.

Nekrasov's offering is like a dream, it is a series of hits and misses, and a whole bunch of almost have beens. Using a blend of techniques that range from a hand-held 8mm to some computer animation, he tries to offer a dissection of the post-Communist reconstruction of Russian identity, or the lack of it thereof. In many ways, the emphasis seems to be not so much on the search for a Westernized good life but on a phantom imitation of it that leaves even the successful empty and lifeless.

In bizarre irony, there also seems to exist a kind of twisted continuity, in which the new 'democracy' has inherited the inhumane traits of its red predecessor, and has amplified them a hundred-fold by removing the veneer of denial that the old regime always slapped on social problems. Exposed, life is brutish, empty, quite disgusting, and without an excuse. No one seems to be enjoying life, neither the expensive prostitute, nor the successful executive; neither the aspiring filmmaker, full of quack philosophy and endowed with undeniable success in lust, nor his unlikely paramour, a merciless and remorseful killer for hire, who nearly offs him during one of her assignments, and who beds him while still maintaining liaisons with her lover in prison.

Everything is decaying, walls are peeling, paintings lie in the mud, and every woman teeters on the verge of hysteria because of lack sexual satisfaction, among other things. Eventually, the strange film finds a strange client in the decadent West, whose glitter and nicely decorated apartments prove to be an illusory shell for the very same basic, and ultimately as destructive as they are useless, passions. The disappointed killer murders the disappointed director, who was about to fuck the disappointed Western client, who ... The only fitting scene in the film was the ending, in which Lubov finds herself in an asylum, and asks about the punishment for accepting love while offering none in return.

Good poetry, badly mangled in translation, the film is more demanding than most of the recent 'dream sequences' I have seen. Unfortunately, it is so in a way that sometimes taxed my patience. The English subtitles had only a vague relation to the Russian dialogue.

January 14, 2002