Husband dies, wife is liberated

Young Natalia's unappealing husband, a railroad worker, keels over as a train passes by. He's dead, and her life begins. Storozheva's feminist portrait, not set in any clearcut time, feels slight but is beautifully shot and the young Kseniya Kutepova, who plays Natalia, has definite star quality.

Things initially are pale gray, in tune with Natalia's hitherto joyless life. She uses a railroad trolley to take her husband's body to the morgue and exchanges the family cow, a symbol of her servitude, for a white goat. Young Sergei (Dmitri Dyuzhev), an estranged husband with a spoiled young daughter, it turns out, gives Natalia a ride in his pickup and before long they're having a roll in the hay back at her place. When she's done and he won't go, she shows who's boss by pointing a shotgun at him.

The relationship is off and on for a while. Sergei is hunky and director Storozhova doesn't mind showing him off nude from all angles. He's one of those sensitive brutish types that pop up in Russian films. He's also highly sexed. That's fine with Natalia, whose never known sexual pleasure before, and she lets him back into her life and even gets friendly with his little daughter, despite the latter's annoying manner. But Sergei seals his doom when he says he wants to marry Natalia, get a cow, and turn her into a housewife. This is the limit of his mindset--and, apparently, of how Storozheva wants to represent men in the film.

Natalia is dreaming of other things. She has already gone around in a wedding dress just for fun, dressed up in rust and pink to set off her red hair, is immediately taken up by a group of train riders who stop over, and is hit on by the men. She goes on a brief ride, chased by her dog, then jumps off. Later she goes on a solitary ferris wheel ride and her radiant face symbolizes her impending liberation. Natalia has been compared to Tilda Swinton (she has her alabaster skin and auburn hair) but she also resembles the young Meryl Streep. This is a nice vehicle for her, and the film itself has won some festival prizes. Eventually Natalia takes a (symbolic?) boat ride to an orphanage (she was raised there herself, it seems) and adopts an enterprising boy of 10 or 12 with her coloring. In the final scene Natalia is returning homeward in her boat and the boy and her dog are falling in love with each other.

This seems a transparent and naive depiction of woman's liberation; what weakens it is the unspecific, fable-like setting and narrative. But technically it is flawless, the images lovely, keyboard music germane, and Ms. Kutepova a winner.

Shown at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2008

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.