Pro urodov i lyudey

"Pro urodov i lyudej" (Aleksei Balabanov, 1998) is a dark, quixotic look at the earliest days of underground film making in Russia. One of its most interesting features is that the entire film is shot in sepia tone rather than full color, no doubt to emphasize the dreariness of its subject. There are a few outdoor scenes that show us a blue sky, but aside from that the entire film is rendered in that muted sepia color.

The sad-faced, willowy Dinara Drukarova plays Lisa, a young woman who is imprisoned in her own family home and forced to pose nude for the camera, being whipped on screen for the pleasure of a few depraved male customers. After several months of captivity, Lisa escapes and heads for the big city to make a new life for herself... but discovers that the degrading scenes she has been posing for have become a fixation for her.

The title translates into English as "Of Freaks and Men."The "freaks" part comes in when we are introduced to young Siamese twins, joined at the waist.

But as the film progresses, we perceive that the twins are the least "freaky" characters in the film.

Though the scenario is admittedly somber, there is a richness of tone and a strong storyline driving the film forward. We want to know what ultimately happens to the heroine, Lisa, and to the young conjoined twins. "Of Freaks and Men" is justly celebrated for these compelling virtues.

remarkable as portrait of survive of a world. for the images. for the inspired cast. and for the courage. a film about freaks and sins, about appearances and profit, about victims as reflections of cruelty against them. and the perfect music as respiration of story. a puzzle of characters. and the links who defines each. traces of absurd and pornography. and a new era.at first sigh, a Russian Salo. in fact, only sketch of a society after Communism.cold, direct, without masks. or, maybe, a parable. its sense seems be not very important. because it could be a film about viewer. a puzzle for self definition. or a testimony about the secret rooms of few lives.

Alexei's Balabanov's Of Freaks of Men was a quite strange yet interesting viewing experience. The film mechanics and overall setting seemed to contradict the content that was being portrayed, perhaps to construct a novel "Balabanov" perspective. For instance, the use of pre- Revolutionary Tsarist Russia as a setting, complete with bourgeois colonnade backdrops and 19th century luxuries and proprieties, to display an underground pornography business that slowly takes over the lives of the main characters was quite an unexpected juxtaposition. The use of "brown-screen" (black and white?), intertitles, and classical music further strengthened this divide, almost making it seem like the organized crime of Balabanov's Brother 2 existed and was captured on film in the early days of cinema!

There are several ways one can interpret this artistic leap. One interesting perspective is to view the decline of the doctor's and engineer's Bourgeois families at the hands of the exploiting Johann as yet another example of the failure of Capitalism in the eyes of a Communist. The fathers of the two families made their money in a hog- eat-hog Capitalistic world, and their children (Tolya/Kolya and Liza respectively) ended up being used by a bigger Capitalist hog, Johann the pornographer. An alternative view would be a demonstration of how post- Soviet Russian organized crime was not an artifact of that particular era, and that it existed underground since before even Communism. That would have turned the movie into a nationalistic excuse for the deterioration that occurred in Russia after Gorbachev.

Although other views can be constructed, I feel like this movie was nevertheless a very successful and creative experiment on Balabanov's part. He has captured the new in the style of the very old to create a unique movie.

Very odd Russian film, with a modern, almost postmodern theme (concerning Siamese twins and pornography), but set in the early years of the twentieth century and shot in a faux-naive style that one might almost believe was that of films from this period, if one was not aware of what they were really like. There's much to enjoy: the beautiful sepia photography (of the Russian winter, and of eyeballs); great facial acting; the downright oddness of plot, scene composition characterisation and movement; the sudden discontinuities, and the semi-random, peculiarly worded captions. Hardly a movie in the traditional sense, but still a work of art.

OF FREAKS AND MEN is a constantly interesting story and film-------very well photographed---------about a strange, psychopathic pornographer who makes movies of women being whipped by a "nanny" for the underground market at the turn of the century. The film is shot in a sepia tone to give a nice authenticity to the proceedings. If you've seen photographs from the fin-de-siecle, you realize what marvelous recreations of those romantic-------though risqué--------photographs the filmmakers have achieved. Many of them look very much like the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron----------one of the finest photographers working after the Civil War, who specialized in photographing women in dream like, highly romantic, almost spiritual scenes. She never did photos like this, of course, but the same care was taken in the art direction of this film.

But most interesting of all is the psychological workings of the minds of the very respectable middle class characters who find themselves drawn to this seedy business against their wills, but are quite willing to pursue their newfound inner freedom after the pornographer has left. This is one of Image Entertainment's most artistic releases for 2001. More please.

Jay F.