Russian Film Festival

The local Russian Film Festival has always been referred to as the Russian Resurrection, and that notion of bringing back the past – of bringing back former national/artistic glories from the dead – is often reflected in the programming. Frequently, there is an incongruousness between the new Russian cinema shown – which is often, to be honest, awful commercial crap – and the old classics from Tarkovsky, Mikhalkov or Eistenstein that are brought out annually. Which isn't to say the festival is entirely lacking in contemporary cinematic worth; last year found a blessed screening of Alexander Mindadze's Innocent Saturday, a slice of history-as-in-the-moment-vérité in which the citizens of Chernobyl go about their lives whilst the nuclear reactor burns, the film an anti-disaster-movie whose sly symbolism and profound parable give it extra edge in contemporary Russia.

There's nothing so interesting in the 2012 festival, which doesn't even have the typical retrospective-of-a-master to fall back on. Instead, there's a three-film program of movies set against the Napoleonic Wars of 1812, including Sergei Bondarchuck's infamously-over-the-top seven-hour adaptation of War & Peace, a slice of cinematic grandeur in which the Soviet Empire marshalled, like, half-a-million citizens to stage a nationalist epic.

There are also two films (which doesn't really seem like enough to denote a retrospective) adapted from Chekhov, including Mikhalkov's Unfinished Piece For A Player Piano, his adaptation of That Worthless Fellow Platonov that, on its 1977 release, was already deemed determinedly traditionalist and old-fashioned, and which four decades haven't helped; if you want zany voices dubbed badly over bawdy acting, this is the place. There's also another – new, contemporary – film dramatising the playwright's latter years, The Admirer. And it, too, struggles with audio sync issues, though, too, this may be a device of signposted old-fashionedness. Vitaly Melnikov's drama is of determinedly Chekhovian conceit: setting up that period-piece staple – the torrid, scandalous affair – but refusing to hew towards such dramatic simplicity, revelling, instead, in torturned, torn morality. Lovingly tending to turn-of-the-century settings and wardrobe – this is, let it be known, a frock movie – the slightly-off dubbing almost seems like a deliberate attempt to make it play as not-contemporary, which is perfectly in keeping with the retromania of the Resurrection, where the past is always superior to the present.

The new films on display pretty much reassert such a position: from amongst the commercial dreck and hysterical drama cluttering the program, all of what I've seen has been pretty awful. Starting with August 8th, a wannabe all-action blockbuster that sets a stupendously-shitty family drama against the South Ossetia war, which is depicted with unstinting, unsettling propaganda, the unseen Georgians an invisible menace out to shoot high-tech missiles into buses filled with children. Against such noxious shrines to contemporary interventionist military might, we get an even-more-regrettable narrative, about a tediously 'good' mother trying to reunite with her snivelling son, who is so detached from reality the only way he can cope is by imagining his world as a very-poorly-animated computer-game. Two more awful movies: Home and Siberia, Mon Amour, both ensemble pieces set in rural shitholes, in which the local-theatre-production-level acting is all screeching, pantomimed drunkenness (hic!) and characters slapping each other endlessly. If this is the Resurrection, who died for such cinematic sins?