Alexei German Jr.

on Dovlatov: “He was a sex symbol, Elvis

Presley, a legend”
As his not-quite-biopic of the underground Soviet poet is
released on Netflix, we talk to the uncompromising Russian
director about the truth in dreams, life under Brezhnev and
why he has an aversion to movies that play politics.
Milan Maric as the titular Dovlatov

Alexei German Jr. is not yet a household name among cinephiles

although, five features into his career, it’s clear that he’s a filmmaker of
striking vision and ambition. He’s not to be confused with his father, the
late Alexei German, whose own films – including My Friend Ivan Lapshin
and Khroustaliev, My Car! – are still too little known worldwide. But
Alexei Jr. shares his father’s predilection for uncompromising style, and
indeed his visionary edge. His recent work includes Paper Soldier (2008),
a somewhat Antonioni-esque evocation of the Soviet space programme,
and a futuristic, dream-like take on Russia’s present, Under Electric
Clouds (2015).

Dovlatov is now on Netflix.

He has now made his most visible film to date, Dovlatov, which played in
competition in Berlin in February, winning a Silver Bear for Outstanding
Artistic Contribution. It can be seen on Netflix from 26 October, while in
Russia it was released in March by Disney/Sony, with 300,000
admissions over its initial four-day release.

The film’s prominence there is in no small part to do with its subject –

Sergei Dovlatov (1941-90), a writer little known outside Russia, and
never published in the Soviet Union in his lifetime, but who became
extremely popular with Russian readers after his death, having migrated
to the US in 1979.

German’s film isn’t a biopic, but a loosely structured, sometimes

dreamlike evocation of the underground of writerly, artistic bohemia in
Leningrad in the early 70s, a period when intellectuals, including
Dovlatov’s friend and fellow émigré writer Joseph Brodsky, were
experiencing the Brezhnev-era reaction to the thaw of the Krushchev
years. The film is not so much a portrait of its hero – wittily played
though he is by Serbian actor Milan Maric – more a wide-ranging,
sometimes impressionistic depiction of (as Michael Pattison put it in
his S&S first-look festival review) “a world whose default mode is
melancholy”. I talked to Alexei German Jr. in Berlin in Feburary, after his
film premiered.
Dovlatov isn’t a familiar figure in the West, but a very popular
one in Russia. Why is he significant?

In Russia, he became known only after his death. He had a rather better
fortune in the States because he was published there, and appeared in
the New Yorker, and was praised by Kurt Vonnegut. But then he became
one of the most famous Russian writers of the last quarter of the 20th
century. He’ll always be less known in the West, because some of the
words he uses are barely translatable into English, and the
American/Anglo-Saxon way of thinking is not suitable for understanding
Dovlatov as we understand him in Russian.

The film gives us a sense of his problems writing and getting

published – but we don’t get a sense of what his writing is
actually like.

It was a decision to keep that a mystery, because it wouldn’t be possible

to explain everything about his writing. There are some cultural layers
that will be understandable only to Russians. The film is much more
serious, much more tragic than his prose.

Is that why you made film about Dovlatov rather than about
someone who might connect more easily with Western viewers,
such as Brodsky?

There was already a film about Brodsky [Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s

2009 Room and a Half]. Of course, Brodsky is a poet and a hero, but
Dovlatov is a much more complex figure. He’s brave, but at the same
time not so brave, he was loved by women but at the same time he
loved his family very much, he was just more witty. He doesn’t exactly
look Russian, either: he’s half Jewish, half Armenian. He was a sex
symbol; he was Elvis Presley, a legend. We don’t have many legends like
that. A lot of people have Dovlatov tattoos – on their faces, arms,
everywhere.

It’s appropriate that Dovlatov ended up in New York. The world

you depict – Leningrad in the early 70s – seems very close to
New York’s bohemia of ten years earlier, in terms of people’s
belief in art and writing.

It was a time of extreme togetherness, a time when people, artists,

writers wanted to make real literature. It was a very romantic time. Even
though everyone quarrelled with each other, they were extremely
united.
The Leningrad of the 70s and 80s is not the same as the Petersburg of
the 90s. Back then, there were many more talents, many more people
who wanted to make literature and art. The emigration started with
Dovlatov and Brodsky, but in the 90s it became very serious – a lot of
the intelligentsia left for the States, Israel, Germany, and almost no one
came back. And with the gradual decay of culture and education, that
huge respect for Russian art, and the love of the avant-garde, started to
disappear, the same as the city. Nowadays the city is absolutely
different; it’s a city of skyscrapers in the European style.

There are a number of dreams in the film, which feel very

characterististic of a Russian literary tradition.

It was important for me to say through Dovlatov’s dreams what I

couldn’t say otherwise. For example, I couldn’t say a lot about his time
as a prison guard, or his desire to be close to power. I didn’t want to
make a biopic, so I just fragmented everything I couldn’t say and put it
into the dreams, and compressed it into a few days.

Dovlatov is the centre of the film, but more a recording

consciousness than a traditional hero. You give us a lot to see
and hear, a very busy world with a lot of people on screen, and
he plays our guide to it.

It’s not a film about Dovlatov, it’s about that generation in general. I
wanted to capture the real life and the energy of that time.

What’s remarkable is that the people in the film don’t have

21st-century faces – they all seem to belong to the Soviet Union
of that time.

We were gathering faces from different countries and different cities. We

had a whole room with photos of all the people who appear on screen,
and we spent four months just mixing the photos, looking to see whether
a particular person could be on screen at a given time. We even had
someone flying in from Khabarovsk, on the border with China, and they’d
say two or three phrases, just to show whether they had the face of that
time – and if we didn’t like their face, we wouldn’t have them in the
cinema.

You have a very different style from your father, but you do have
some things in common – notably the way you work in three
dimensions, with complex action, complex camera moves, the
way you explore space and sound.
I can’t watch those festival movies were everyone is silent, then they sit
around eating for ages, then they suffer because something terrible
happens, then they’re silent again, then there’s a rape scene… It’s just
boring.

Movies aren’t politics. Antonioni, Bergman, Fellini aren’t about politics,

they’re about soul. Now nearly all movies are about politics, they’re
always supporting someone, protecting someone, and that’s fine, but
cinema’s about more than that. It’s art.

The historical moment you deal with in Dovlatov, and the status
of writers in the Soviet Union – is that something that’s still
remembered? If you show this film to young people in Russia,
can they recognise it?

The current generation doesn’t know anything. They’re the generation of

stability, of normality – in big cities they all have their mobiles and
everything. They don’t understand the Soviet Union, they don’t know
when Lenin died or who Trotsky was, and for them the 19th and 20th
centuries in Russian culture and history are virtually the same thing.
They’d find this film hard to understand, because they don’t understand
the era.

Is that amnesia something that the current regime encourages?

It’s useful to have people not understand the past because then
they won’t understand the present.

I wouldn’t put it that way exactly, but in a way you’re right. There have
been two news items about our film every day on the biggest Russian TV
channel – yesterday they talked about it as a film about censorship in
the Soviet Union. So the film isn’t being silenced. I don’t see a desire to
forget this epoch – there are monuments to Dovlatov and Brodsky all
over Russia.

Conversely, there are people who don’t like Dovlatov because he

emigrated to the US. There were influential people – I won’t say who –
who didn’t want the film to be made, because they felt it was not
patriotic enough, not positive enough.

But we were supported by [Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir]

Medinsky, [head of the Russian Cinematograhers’ Union Nikita]
Mikhalkov and [CEO of Channel One Russia Konstantin] Ernst. They are
the people with power in Russian culture, and they supported the film –
and when I tell people, no one believes me. Maybe it would be more
useful if I said that I was suppressed, that I was facing a jail sentence in
the near future – but the reality is that we were supported by influential
people.
Dovlatov first look: a talented artist’s frustrations in
Brezhnev’s Soviet Union
Milan Maric brings a commanding wit to his portrayal of
writer Sergei Dovlatov in the new dense and formally
rigorous film from Alexei German, Jr.

Dovlatov is a character study in the proper sense. Unfolding across a

typical week (“of little joys and big sorrows”) in Leningrad in November
1971, Alexei German Jr’s subtly layered fifth feature carves out a portrait
of its eponymous protagonist – the Armenia-born novelist Sergei
Dovlatov (1941-90) – as son, father, divorcé, worker, Jew. And, of course,
as a man of letters: dramatised in his days prior to emigrating to New
York, where belated recognition as one of the most significant Soviet
writers of the twentieth century would follow, Dovlatov (played with a
commanding wit by Serbian actor Milan Marić) is only one of many
serious artists struggling to retain their integrity in a climate actively
hostile to their independence.

Free of cheap psychology, German’s film positions its characters –

Dovlatov’s pals include fellow scribes Joseph Brodsky (Arthur
Beschastny) and Anatoly Kuznetsov (Anton Shagin) – in relation to a
vividly evoked geo-cultural landscape in which the everyday fight for
artistic freedom is a matter of life and death. Set seven years into Leonid
Brezhnev’s reign as the leader of the USSR, the film sketches an
institutional fabric built on the death agony of a pathologically paranoid
state bureaucracy: any optimism initially prompted by the process of de-
Stalinisation has all but gone.

Patriotism, the delusional self-regard that led to the doomed escapades

of socialism in one country, is an endemic poison. Dovlatov, working as a
journalist for a factory newspaper between rejections from literary
magazines, is sent on a “nonsense assignment, an absurdity of
unprecedented thrust”: he visits a film set, where he encounters actors
dressed as literary figures cued to deliver platitudinous praise to him
about Mother Russia. Barely able to conceal his disdain for such a
charade, he meets an actress dressed as Natasha Rostova, who reckons
she’s not as real as Tolstoy’s character. “You’re very real,” Sergei replies.
“And better.” Marić reads the line with a warm, knowing cynicism; it’s
less a compliment than a protest.
There’s much to like here. German accumulates a dense index (images,
reference points) as a means of properly fleshing out a cinematic space:
his scenes drift with an understated, oneiric agitation. It’s not enough to
orchestrate multiple planes of action across single takes lasting several
(unshowy) minutes. There are deliberate obstructions, background
details, extras blocking our view of a scene’s ostensible point of interest:
a kind of slow-burn, narratively redundant maximalism in aid (I think) of
a lived-in verisimilitude – even if the washed-out colour palette, all
earthy browns and custard yellows, somehow comes out looking too
clean, too easy, too digital (the costumes are in bad need of some dirt,
some filth).

Likewise, as if to approximate a society in which any passing comment

might at any moment be overheard, weaponised, used as incriminating
evidence, background speech is often elevated to the same volume as
that of central characters. In one darkly comic scene that points to a
culture of top-down terror, Dovlatov tricks a black-market bookseller into
thinking he is a soldier querying customers’ reading habits – evidence of
allegiances in opposition to the state.

Progressing in such a way that neither its premise nor endpoint is clear,
the film is simultaneously persistent on a scene-to-scene basis and yet
elusive in its totality. This might have something to do with the
abovementioned combination of a seemingly disinterested camera style
and a de-centred, searching sound design, but such ambiguities are also
compounded by other structural choices. Specifying dates with onscreen
text, for instance, imbues the film’s casual, quotidian framework with a
narrative tension, suggesting that this is all leading to somewhere in
particular. This is also a film in which one character’s suicide comes and
goes as a visually shocking but barely consequential aside: the ultimate
denial of narrative causality is rendered utterly banal, the logical
culmination of a world whose default mode is melancholy.

Dovlatov is first and finally, however, a film about writers: the kind who,
being writers, naturally live for late-night bacchanals and soiree debate.
As the vanguard of forward-thinking driven daily underground, they fire
lines at each other like, “In ten years, no one will remember
Mandelstam,” or, “Reality is inseparable from fiction in Russia,” or
“Talent rarely aligns with success.” Where’s the lie?
‘Dovlatov’
Six days in the life of Soviet dissident writer Sergei Dovlatov are evocatively
conjured in this visually enthralling tribute to one artist’s refusal to
conform.
By JAY WEISSBERG

The struggles of dissident writers in the Soviet Union will likely always remain a key
theme of Russian cinema, ripe for ruminating on unappreciated artists in society and the
fight for recognition notwithstanding power concentrated in the hands of apparatchiks.
Maverick director Alexey German Jr. brings his signature dreamlike vision to the subject
with “Dovlatov,” a classically German take on six days in the life of writer
Sergei Dovlatov, when the as-yet unrecognized author was trying to get published. Working
for the first time with “Ida” cinematographer Lukasz Zal, the director once again delivers
enthralling choreographed tracking shots that add a Fellini-esque overlay to straightforward
depictions of reality, making the film a visual treat.

However, it clearly caters to an audience who’ll thrill at recognizing a host of references to

20th-century literary giants from Yevtushenko and Mandelstam to Steinbeck and Nabokov.
“Dovlatov” might not expect you to know all about Dovlatov the man or his writings, and
it’s easy to simply be mesmerized by German’s exceptional talent for stage blocking and
camera movements, yet while there’s much here to appreciate, the film lacks the power of
“Under Electric Clouds” despite being his most emotionally approachable work to date. To
boot, Dovlatov’s popularity within Russia has yet to be replicated outside, where he’s
largely mentioned simply as an important writer friend of Joseph Brodsky, notwithstanding
frequent appearances in The New Yorker magazine. That perception won’t help
international sales beyond expected, and limited, Euro art houses.

Dovlatov (Serb actor Milan Marić) himself narrates part of the story, beginning Nov. 1,
1971, when the relative liberality of the early Brezhnev years was replaced by an
increasingly hardline ideological push. Writers refusing to stick to championing factory
workers and the glories of Socialist Man, or those introducing notes of irony in their
coverage of communist celebrations, were censored or unemployed. Like many of his
peers, Dovlatov was reduced to pounding out articles for a factory magazine since he’s
refused membership in the Writers Guild and can’t get his poems and stories published. It’s
natural that bosses would get him to write a feature on the little movie the factory
commissioned to commemorate the anniversary of the Revolution, in which workers
dressed as literary giants praise Soviet achievements. Only Dovlatov can’t treat it seriously,
and his superiors aren’t happy.

While finding comfort in the company of intellectual comrades such as Brodsky (Artur
Beschastny), listening to jazz (lovingly evoked) and exchanging stories of frustration,
Dovlatov is also coping with a personal life out of whack: He and wife Lena (Helena
Sujecka) are contemplating divorce, and he’s currently living with his supportive mother,
though he regularly sees daughter Katya (Eva Gerr). Over the next few days, each signaled
like a chapter heading, Dovlatov begins the morning with an uncongenial assignment, tries
to make the necessary connections to get into the Guild, and ends the evenings in a jazz-
filled literary and artistic salon with friends.

He’s thrown a bone by a literary magazine editor (Hanna Sleszynska) who tells him to write
a celebratory story on subway builder and poet Anton Kuznetsov (Anton Shagin,
“Hipsters”) — “pure and positive prose” — but both men are moved by the accidental
discovery of children’s skeletons from World War II, and puff pieces seem irrelevant. Better
to head to a park where a black market in banned literature thrives, though crackdowns are
happening there as well.

German ends the film after six days, which is eight years before Dovlatov managed to
emigrate to the U.S. with his family (he died in 1990 at only 48, just one year after his
works were finally published in his home country). The sense one gets of the man does him
tribute: warm-hearted, intelligent without being pretentious, justifiably angry without
feeling complete defeat. German captures the world of the Leningrad intellectual with great
attention to detail and as usual takes the narrative at his own unhurried pace. Much of the
international cast is dubbed in a relatively seamless manner, and Maric, in his first lead
role, exudes gentility with physical strength. The script isn’t overladen with poetry
recitations (so often deadly in any film), though it does have a sense of repetition.

Even Dovlatov fans will likely agree that the movie’s strength lies in the visuals, both in
terms of camerawork and Elena Okopnaya’s excellent production design. German has
perfected a certain Russian knack for tracking shots that become immersed with the
characters before gliding away alongside them, creating a unique graphic rhythm. His
pictorial sense is, as ever, a strong suit, playing with filters that lighten scenes to a
dreamlike haze of memory before turning warmer and clearer.
DOVLATOV
October 26, 2018
Aleksey German’s aimless period drama “Dovlatov” is more concerned with
unhurriedly observing the Leningrad of November 1971 in patches than rushing to
bind together its social patterns. This is a world of artists and thinkers of all stripes,
continually told what they can’t do, say, write or take interest in (like the works of
Jackson Pollock) under the close-watch of Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. And it
builds and builds with no perceptible destination in mind—in fact, it took me a while to
accept German’s fogginess and settle into his film’s drifting rhythm that, for a long
time, seemed like it was searching for something to say. With its script (co-written by
German and Yulia Tupikina) that lacks the traditional structure of a three-part act,
“Dovlatov” managed to evoke in me an overall feeling of internment. Along with it
crept in a gloomy mood, gradually formed through the collective frustrations of the
time’s hampered dwellers.

Plunging the audience into a hazy and snow-covered trance, German’s character study
follows a week in the life of one such burdened occupant. He is Sergei Dovlatov (Milan
Maric, remarkable in an otherwise forgettable package), the iconic and much-
celebrated (albeit, way too late) Russian writer of Armenian and Jewish decent, who
didn’t quite find the fame and acceptance he deserved during his short life of 48 years.
In a troubled marriage with his wife Lena (Helena Sujecka) and a good father to his
daughter Katya (Eva Gerr), the young Dovlatov lives with his mother while he routinely
receives a series of rejections on his manuscripts from literary officials.
Having era-appropriate, sociopolitical interests around uncovering the truth within
public structures, Dovlatov hits wall after wall in a country prepping to celebrate the
approaching anniversary of the Revolution, but failing to invest in its greatest
intellectual minds. His mother reminds him early on that he is nobody unless he gets
published. Yet Dovlatov shows no desire to abandon his principles just to score a spot
in the Writers’ Union. Hence, he gets stuck with pointless reporting for a factory
newspaper that only serves propagandist purposes; a job he loses in due course due to
his dignified idealism. His closest comrades seem to be doing no better. Among his
fellow sufferers are writers Joseph Brodsky (Artur Beschastny) and Anatoly Kuznetsov
(Anton Shagin), both hungry for the kind of freedom of expression they know they
won’t be granted.

I wish I could tell you “Dovlatov” gets enlivened occasionally with flourishes of energy
and wit. (It doesn’t.) Despite a story that traffics lively jazz clubs, fiery literary scenes
and conceptually textured streets, German’s film doesn’t quite know how to let the
audience in, with an insistent voiceover (heavier in the early moments) overwhelming
the tableaux. The most absurdly memorable segment of “Dovlatov” arrives early on,
when our frustrated hero on an assignment speaks with actors at a shipyard—they
portray legends like Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky and
comment on the current state of affairs in a dutifully positive manner. Along the way, a
tragic, out-of-nowhere suicide (of a writer who can’t face yet another rejection) occurs
to our distress and an especially gut-wrenching discovery of children’s remains from
the World War II injects deeper historical context into the story. Still, these weighty
moments fail to reach their dramatic potential under the film’s overall emotional chill.
Celebrated cinematographer Lukasz Zal thoughtfully shoots German’s expansive
physical and political landscape, captured by Elena Okopnaya’s detailed production
design. The sound design pays special attention to background mutterings, aiming to
immerse the audience in the era. Yet Zal, whose black-and-white lens spectacularly
elevated Pawel Pawlikowski’s stunning “Ida” and does wonders for the same
filmmaker’s upcoming (and equally wonderful) "Cold War," somehow washes out the
film with a frustratingly muted palette, while trying to underscore the dream-like
quality of the story. While “Dovlatov” obliquely recalls the visual qualities of the
aforementioned films, it can’t match their decisive artistry. (I honestly wondered
whether monochrome would have served German’s film better as well.) The end
credits remind us of Dovlatov’s late-success, which he briefly found and enjoyed after
he immigrated to New York City in 1979, where he concluded his tragically short life. If
only the six days we spent in his presence weren’t so lifeless and managed to reflect his
untapped literary greatness to superior effect.
BERLIN 2018: GRASS, DOVLATOV, TRANSIT
by Michael Pattison
February 18, 2018 |

One of the many double-edged joys of attending a film festival is accounting for one’s
limitations as a critic. The challenge of understanding a new movie in relation to its
director’s previous work—to name only one method of getting to grips with a movie—
has always been compounded by accessibility (who is able to see what and when), and
the critical approaches to negotiating it are myriad. While some critics strive toward
completism, others seek to contextualize a new work from other perspectives,
commenting for instance on the ways in which it expresses or confronts contemporary
politics, or the prevailing cultural mood. Reading Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1995
collection Placing Movies as my plane landed in Berlin this week, I’m increasingly
inclined to be upfront about such things, in the belief that it ultimately helps to
highlight that seeing or not seeing every other film by a director only matters if it needs
to. Three movies that have premiered at the 68th Berlinale provide a useful case in
point.
'Dovlatov': Berlin Review
BY JONATHAN ROMNEY17 FEBRUARY 2018
Alexey German Jr looks back at a week in the life of Russian poet Sergei
Dovlatov

Alexei German Jr’s Dovlatov could almost have been called ‘Ballad of the
Unknown Writer’. At least, it’s the story of a writer who remained unknown in his
lifetime, and is still little discussed in the West, although after his death in 1989 he
went on to be highly acclaimed in Russia. This slow-burning, pensively drifting
evocation of the times of Sergei Dovlatov is not a conventional portrait, still less a
biopic, but an imaginatively realistic recreation of a bygone era of Russian culture,
when literature and art were considered matters of life and death – and when
holding onto your artistic integrity could literally damage your chances of survival.

Dovlatov is played with a mixture of ruefulness, affability and brooding warmth by

Serbian actor Milan Maric in his first international role
The film’s talky, borderline-narrative and altogether dream-like feel won’t make it an
obvious commercial proposition, but festivals should gravitate towards a film that’s
indirectly as much about the survival of serious artistry in cinema as in any other
realm.

With its overlapping dialogue, complex use of crowds and beautifully

choreographed long-take camerawork, Dovlatov is very much of a stylistic piece
with the other films of Alexey German Jr – Paper Soldier (2008), an Antonioni-
esque piece about the early Soviet space programme, and the futuristic Under
Electric Clouds (2015). Dovlatov contrives to be at once dreamily impressionistic –
it actually contains two engaging dream sequences – and highly concrete in its
evocation of a week in the life of the young Dovlatov, an aspiring writer who can’t
get his work published and has been excluded from the USSR’s Writers’ Union (his
Jewish-Armenian identity no doubt being one reason, his ironic outlook being
another).

The place is Leningrad in November 1971, when a hardline cultural freeze was
replacing the relative permissiveness of the 60s. Poet Dovlatov (Milan Maric),
newly divorced and living with his mother in a crammed shared apartment, is
experiencing a writing block and contemplating a novel, but trying to earn a living
working for an industrial magazine.
Over the following week – of “little joys and big sorrows,” as he puts it – Dovlatov
has awkward meetings with his ex-wife Elena (Helena Sujecka), hangs out with
fellow writer and later Nobel winner Joseph Brodsky (Artur Beschastny), and
spends evening after evening at bohemian soirées where marginal, struggling
writers and artists listen to jazz and argue vehemently about the value of assorted
poets – for this was a time when literature was a religion, and a lifeline to sanity.

Some of Dovlatov’s circle don’t fare well – a young man attempts suicide in the
office of a literary magazine, a painter dies after being arrested for black
marketeering – while others survive by putting their beliefs on hold. Dovlatov
himself – played with a mixture of ruefulness, affability and brooding warmth by
Serbian actor Maric, in his first international role – survives by maintaining a
playfully ironic, even satiric outlook, at one point playing cat-and-mouse with a
drunken informer over people’s interest in reading Nabokov’s Lolita.

The film seems at times to drift directionlessly over the week of its action, but then,
finding and sustaining some direction in life is the big issue in these excluded
artists’ lives. A number of emotional spikes punctuate the drama – notably the
discovery in a Metro tunnel dig of children who died in the siege of Leningrad. But
overall, the film catches the mood of both memory and dream, and of an era in
Russian history that could now be too easily forgotten. Dovlatov went on to
emigrate to the US, where he eventually died, but his intermittent voice-over ends
this superficially downbeat film with a positive message: “We exist.”

This stylistically distinctive film, artistically soft-spoken as it is, nevertheless figures

as a cri de coeur for our own era, in Russia and elsewhere: if art and the belief in
art diminish, we all lose unimaginably.
'Dovlatov': Film Review | Filmart 2018
An evocative portrait of a stagnant era.

Writer Sergei Dovlatov’s talents are blocked by the regime in Alexey German
Jr.’s literary portrait of an authoritarian society.

Soviet-era emigre novelist and poet Sergei Dovlatov may not be a

household name in the West, but at home he is considered a superstar, a
symbol of the USSR’s tragic rejection of its greatest artists and talents and,
more generally, of reality itself. In director Alexey German Jr.'s backward
glance at his country’s communist past, Dovlatov poetically evokes a long-
lost world in which poetry mattered tremendously, and writers like the hero
preferred to starve than write commissioned kitsch and lies.

Outside of festivals, however, it may not be easy to scrounge up audiences

for the story of a man languishing under imposed writer’s block. Serbian
actor Milan Maric impressively fills the boots of the Jewish-Armenian writer
with his commanding, ironic presence, but he has little to do but roam the
streets and literary haunts of Leningrad. Still, the film is a much easier
watch than the director’s last feature, the dour Under Electric
Clouds (2015). In that film, people dreamed about the end of the world; at
least Dovlatov dreams about Brezhnev giving him an encouraging pat on
the back.

The entire film takes place over six cold, snowy-white days in November
1971 in Leningrad, where a broad spectrum of Russian writers and artists
past and present are evoked like witnesses to history. Dovlatov, who we
know will ultimately be forced to immigrate to New York, floats through
literary salons and publishing houses in search of a way to express himself
without compromising his integrity as a writer. It proves a hopeless task.

Though his talent was widely recognized in his day, he was too much the
nonconformist to get entry into the writers union. Without membership, he
can publish nothing except senseless reports and interviews for a factory
newspaper glorifying Soviet society, where “greed is a thing of the past.”
But even there his staunch integrity gets him fired.

Between visits to literary soirees and jazz clubs, squabbling with his wife
over their upcoming divorce and taking his young daughter Katya on walks
through the snow, Dovlatov’s life stagnates and unravels. There isn’t much
trace of the legendary sense of humor that is so evident in his books
like The Suitcase: A Novel and Pushkin Hills. Life seems overwhelmed by the
everyday absurdities of society.
In one surreal scene set at a shipyard (a location that foreshadows the
Polish Solidarity movement a decade later), Dovlatov talks to actors dressed
up as Tolstoy, Pushkin and Dostoevsky about how the masters relate to
current Soviet affairs. He receives politically correct answers.

Another impossible assignment takes him underground to interview a young

oil worker who writes poetry. Or rather, wrote poetry, until he was
disillusioned by love. Dovlatov drags him to a fancy party where German’s
constantly roving camera picks up snatches of unrelated conversations in a
collage of characters that could have come out of a dream.

Even the turning points have an unreal, dreamlike feeling. There is a writer
who slits his wrists in a publisher’s office when his manuscript gets rejected
for the nth time, the arrest and tragic death of a painter who admires
Jackson Pollock, and the painful decision to immigrate abroad by his friend
Joseph Brodsky. As they both know, there is no coming back to the USSR
once you leave, and the film’s merit is to make the viewer understand that
despite all the nonsense and repression, there was something uniquely,
irreplaceably creative about those years

Elena Okopnaya’s stylish sets with vertical interest create a sophisticated

world out of time, echoed in Lukasz Zal’s bright, snow-themed lensing,
dominated by whites and cream colors.
Review: Engrossing drama ‘Dovlatov’ charts
six days in life of Soviet writer
Although its setting and subject might seem a bit far-flung and
obscure for mass consumption, anyone who has ever tried to
succeed as an artist should find much to relate to in “Dovlatov,”
an unusually entertaining bio-drama covering six days in the life
of beleaguered Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov.

This soulful, superbly shot and designed film, directed by Alexey

German Jr. (he co-wrote with Yulia Tupikina), is set in snowy
Leningrad in November 1971. It follows former prison guard
Dovlatov (a gloomily charismatic Milan Maric) as he attempts to
square art and politics as cultural thinking took a harder, more
ideological turn under then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

This rightward shift bodes poorly for the maverick poet and
prose author whose inability to join the coveted Writers’ Union
limits him to cranking out dispiriting, party-line pieces for a
factory newspaper. Suffice to say, it doesn’t go well.

German (“Under Electric Clouds”) deftly draws us into the

Armenian-Jewish Dovlatov’s swirling world of literary salons, jazz
clubs, fraught reporting gigs, chatter and cigarettes with fellow
artists, and angsty interactions with family and friends.

It all makes for a dreamy, compelling, often wry look at a writer

who would eventually publish 12 novels after immigrating to the
United States in 1979 and only posthumously (he died of heart
failure in 1990 at 48) gain fame in his homeland.
Dovlatov and Outlaw King take pains to present
the past as their audiences would prefer to
see it
Two new Netflix releases show remarkable lapses in their directors’ good
sense.
By Ben Sachs

In the past month, Netflix has premiered two visually impressive historical
dramas by noted directors. Aleksei German Jr.'s Dovlatov, a nontraditional biopic
of Russian novelist Sergei Dovlatov, became available to stream at the end of
October, while David Mackenzie's Outlaw King, about the Scots' armed rebellion
against English occupation in the early 14th century, was made available on the
site two weeks ago. Neither film is American, yet both feel like Hollywood
productions in their slick stylization and blatant anachronisms. In fact one might
say that Dovlatov and Outlaw King go down as easily as they do because they
advance a recognizably contemporary perspective on the past. One watches these
films comfortably on the "right" side of history—it's clear who you're supposed
to root for and jeer against, and the filmmakers make efforts to honor 21st-
century concepts of anti-imperialism and women's rights. I can't speak to the
historical accuracy of either, though I wouldn't be surprised if it were minimal in
both.

I prefer Dovlatov to Outlaw King for a few reasons: it introduced me to a subject

with which I was unfamiliar, and I found it more inventive in its form and
structure. As opposed to most artist biopics, which attempt to summarize the
subjects' entire careers, Dovlatov takes the novel approach of dramatizing just six
days in the protagonist's life. And where traditional biopics devote at least some
time to the subjects' creative achievements, Dovlatov is concerned exclusively
with the hero's failures. Sergei Dovlatov (who died in 1990 at the age of 48) was
a novelist who was unable to publish his books in the Soviet Union and became
respected in his home country only after his death. German's film looks in on the
writer in early November 1971 when Dovlatov (played by Milan Maric in a
winningly wry performance) is at the height of his frustration. Estranged from his
wife and daughter and working as a reporter for a factory newspaper (the only
writing job he can get), he finds solace in killing time with other suppressed
writers and artists. German, directing a script he wrote with Yulia Tupikina, crafts
a ingratiatingly warm portrait of this stifled community, developing an ironic
sense of moral triumph amidst professional defeat.

It probably isn't a coincidence that the film takes place in the same year that
German's father (one of the all-time great Russian directors) completed his
feature Trial on the Road, only for Soviet authorities to suppress it for 15 years.
Indeed Dovlatov often plays like a tribute to German Sr. in its graceful,
mysterious camera movements and in its bursts of odd humor. In one subplot,
Dovlatov pretends to be a police inspector and plays a prank on a pathetic
informant who's been ratting out the intellectuals of Leningrad for trying to
procure contraband copies of Nabokov's Lolita. In another, the writer becomes
obsessed with a dream of talking about piña coladas with Leonid Brezhnev. The
film is unlike the works of German's father in that it occasionally stoops to
sentimentality. The director includes a needless motif in which the broke writer
asks his friends for money so he can buy his daughter a doll, and the film
climaxes with Dovlatov proudly telling off a pompous arts committeeman. Still, I
was so absorbed in German's richly detailed (and largely idealized) vision of the
Soviet past that I could overlook his lapses in good sense.

Outlaw King might be summarized as one big lapse in good sense for David
Mackenzie (Asylum, Spread, Starred Up), one of the finest English-language
directors to emerge in the past two decades. Viewers who have followed his
unpredictable (and always perceptive) career will be shocked by how
conventional this film is in its storytelling—the script, credited to five writers,
follows a familiar war movie template, with the aggrieved Scottish king Robert
Bruce (Chris Pine, returning to his usual bland self after delivering such nuanced
work in Mackenzie's Hell or High Water) suffering indignity at the hands of
English imperials, rounding up fighters, and engaging the occupying army in
combat. Almost none of the characters are particularly developed (the English
villains are laughably one-note), and, most damningly, the movie rarely delivers
compelling depictions of medieval combat. The battle scenes of Outlaw King are
too chaotic to come off as either rousing or terrifying, suggesting that Mackenzie
(who tends to do his best work with smaller ensembles) was simply overwhelmed
by crowds.

There are just enough characteristically imaginative passages to make the film
worthwhile. The opening sequence—which seems to transpire in an unbroken
eight-minute shot—is perhaps the best in the entire picture, with Mackenzie's
roving camera communicating a sense of curiosity about the past that evokes
such medieval epics as Andrei Rublev and Marketa Lazarová. In this scene, the
film introduces its characters, setting, and central power dynamics with the
fluidity of Mackenzie's best work. Outlaw King loses that sense of fluidity soon
after, the stunning long takes giving way to choppy editing (which makes me
wonder if the director's first cut of the film, which was 20 minutes longer than the
present version, maintained the aesthetic of the opening scene), but Mackenzie
still manages to assert his artistic personality through the relationship between
Robert and his wife Elizabeth. King Edward of England marries off Elizabeth,
his goddaughter, to Robert early in the film to improve English-Scottish relations.
The political relationship quickly disintegrates, but Elizabeth and Robert grow to
love each other—in part because Elizabeth demands that Robert treat her like an
equal in their partnership. This sort of enlightened romance may seem highly
unlikely within a medieval setting, but it provides a welcome antidote to the
chauvinism one usually encounters in films that take place in this period.

Outlaw King also stands in contrast to many medieval films (The Seventh
Seal, Rublev, Perceval) in that it doesn't valorize the role of Christianity in pre-
modern Europe; Robert remains the film's hero even though he has no respect for
religion. In one scene, he kills a political rival in a church; in another, his men
slay a bunch of English soldiers observing a Palm Sunday service. Such moments
speak to the brutality of the medieval era, showing that, for some men,
Christianity was nothing more than window dressing on lives determined by
brute force. I wished for more sturdy insights like these; generally speaking, the
film's most interesting historical details tend to arrive in cutaway shots, which
make enough of an impression to remind viewers of Mackenzie's considerable
talent. Here's hoping his next feature will be less compromised than this one. v
Dovlátov, notable realización del ruso Aleksei German Jr. sobre un escritor
sepultado en vida

Un fantasma de ronda
por Leningrado
El film de German Jr. hace de lo íntimo una manifestación capaz de alcanzar dimensión
política sin perder la escala humana, personal.

Por Luciano Monteagudo


Ese maestro de la fotografía que es el polaco Lukasz Zal compone una luz deliberadamente brumosa.

A diferencia de su contemporáneo más famoso, Andrei Zvyagintsev,

director de El regreso, Elena y Leviatán, todas premiadas en los grandes
festivales internacionales y estrenadas también en la Argentina, el
también ruso Aleksei German Jr. es un cineasta de la sutileza y la
introspección. Mientras el primero usa y abusa de las gruesas alegorías
sociales, German Jr. trabaja en el sentido contario: hace de lo íntimo una
manifestación capaz de alcanzar dimensión política sin perder la escala
humana, personal. Y su película más reciente, Dovlátov, uno de los
puntos más altos de la competencia oficial de la última Berlinale, no hace
sino confirmarlo.

Y como varios de los films que se lucieron en la Berlinale de febrero

pasado (entre ellos el alemán Transit, de inminente estreno porteño),
Dovlátov también es una historia de fantasmas, de personajes
perseguidos y silenciados por la historia. Su relato transcurre en menos
de una semana, hacia noviembre de 1971, en ocasión de un nuevo
aniversario de la revolución soviética. Son apenas seis días en la vida de
Serguéi Donátovich Dovlátov, un escritor de origen judío que nunca llegó
a ver publicada su obra en vida en la URSS y que, como informa
sucintamente el film, alcanzó una enorme popularidad en Rusia recién a
partir de los años 90, poco después de su muerte.

Es notable la manera en que German Jr. –hijo de uno de los grandes

cineastas de su país, director de obras maestras como Mi amigo Iván
Lapshin (1984) y Qué difícil es ser dios (2013)– es capaz de pintar una
suerte de gran fresco íntimo, valga la paradoja. Con un uso imponente
del CinemaScope, Dovlátov sigue a su protagonista en su rutinaria vida
cotidiana, ocupándose de su pequeña hija y haciendo de cronista
periodístico de una unidad de trabajo en los astilleros de Leningrado
mientras intenta, sin suerte, ser admitido por la Unión de Escritores. Esta
obstinación no tiene que ver con la necesidad de reconocimiento: esa
pertenencia es lo único que le garantizaría la posibilidad de publicar sus
textos en un marco cultural extremadamente restrictivo.

Al modo de una Dolce vita eslava, la película de German Jr sigue la

deriva fantasmal de su protagonista (interpretado por el serbio Milan
Maric, un actor de notable parecido físico con Marcello Mastroianni)
mientras comparte interminables tertulias after hours con otros poetas en
su misma situación, como su amigo Joseph Brodsky, quien a diferencia
de Dovlátov llegó a la consagración en vida cuando, ya exiliado en los
Estados Unidos, fue premiado con el Nobel.

Con un virtuosismo fuera de norma, German Jr. –ganador del Oso de

Plata de la Berlinale con su film inmediatamente anterior, Bajo las nubes
eléctricas (2015)– construye unos soberbios planos secuencia que van
dando la noción de ese mal sueño del que Dovlátov nunca alcanza a
despertar, a pesar de su filosa ironía y de su humor mordaz, que
tampoco lo ayudan a granjearse la simpatía de la intelligentsia oficial.

La luz deliberadamente brumosa que compone ese maestro de la

fotografía que es el polaco Lukasz Zal (el mismo iluminador de Ida y Cold
War, de Pawel Pawlikowski) contribuye de manera determinante no sólo
a la melancolía que tiñe al protagonista sino también a la idea que
subyace a toda la película y que una escena ilustra de manera muy
especial: durante una excavación para extender el subterráneo, aparecen
los cadáveres de unos niños sepultados por una bomba durante la
Segunda Guerra Mundial. Para bien o para mal, el pasado –como quizás
no imaginó el propio Dovlátov– siempre vuelve a emerger en el presente.