Pagine sommesse

a very unusual film yes, it is slow but such a simple idea : everybody knows Crime and Punishment, right? so let's just take the wanderings of Raskolnikov before and after the murder and leave out all the main scenes this is a film about the time between events and it is remarkable

At its lowest, most repetitive points, such as with Raskolnikov wandering the streets of Saint Petersburg for the upteenth time with no destination planned and not a coherent thought in his head, Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment" may, indeed, bare some similarities to Aleksandr Sokurov's arthouse twaddle, "Whispering Pages"--a picture of utter pretensions full of affected images incoherently and lethargically arranged. Sparsed in between the filmmaker's experiments with alternating between black-and-white photography and a color scheme that barely registers beyond the grayscale, stilted acting and awkward posturing, misty views and water reflections, slow motion, soft focus, stretched images, scenes of men lifting other men and a bizarre crescendo involving the molestation of a statue, the film highlights a few scenes from Dostoevsky's book.

The picture begins after its literary source, with the Raskolnikov type returning to the place where he committed murder. Thereafter, there are some fleeting moments regarding the cat-and-mouse game between him and the police and a reference to Sonya's dead father. The most complete sequence involves Raskolnikov's confession to Sonya. I doubt the narrative would make much sense to anyone unfamiliar with the novel, which would be fine if there were true art here in the imagery and structure instead of languid obfuscation.

I've been seeking out a few adaptations after reading Dostoevsky's story, and I did myself no favors by choosing this as the next film to view after "Norte, the End of History" (2013), which is another ponderous reworking of said material. At least, and this is an important benefit, "Whispering Pages" is significantly shorter than Lav Diaz's four-hours-plus, appropriately-labelled piece of "slow cinema." And, by the way, if you want to see an actual artistic film adaptation of "Crime and Punishment," seek the 1923 Expressionist silent film "Raskolnikow," or Robert Bresson's French New Wave classic "Pickpocket" (1959), or the actually painted animated short "Zbrodnia i kara" (2000).

Set in a vaguely Venetian but patently Slavic underworld that's all cloud-covered, water-lapping texture--tilting, overcast, sibilant--Alexander Sokurov's 1993 feature seems to chart the topography of a world in which scenes from "Crime and Punishment" play out, dreamily and arbitrarily, in the midst of a vast field of debauchery and decay. A man and woman who seem to be Raskolnikov and Sonya are erratically glimpsed in scenes that recall the original; but Sokurov's attention will wander to long-held shots of the nameless city's soot- and dew-covered buildings, or a postcard of a nineteenth-century artist's fantastical vision of an urban megalopolis--sustained for minutes on end. And in the background always is Sokurov's trademark--a soundtrack of the very acutest sensitivity, a Breughel-like canvas of sound so dense and so just-out-of-reach, it becomes a world you spend the entire running time grasping toward.

Sokurov lacks his mentor Tarkovsky's dramatic sense (not that the master had much to begin with). But I think he exceeds him in aural and visual poetry. Sokurov's work with distorted, seemingly handmade lenses, which give his films a pebbled, mottled, leaning-away-and-falling-toward look, have no analog in the rest of cinema, or photography either for that matter. The pace of Sokurov--glacial right up to the line of "narcotic"--may drive some to distraction (as it did when I saw WHISPERING PAGES in Los Angeles). Depending on your mood and blood sugar, it may also, in this phantom, menacing world, be just what the doctor ordered.

A film made after a poem (or was it a book?). Distracting elements like a plot or oral conversation are omitted. You experience the film as a moving, impressionistic painting. It's poetic and dreamy. The sound track is fabulous. It's like being a full hour on the break of sleep and awareness. My favorite film.

A poor, desolated, isolated man wandering the streets after witnessing the bloody murder, looking for meaning of his existence, life, and to search if God really exists consisting tha bits of anti-hero of Dostoevsky 's Crime and Punishment descending into Dante's Inferno.

Minimum dialogues with good visuals.