News

Film-maker known for his dark take on post-Soviet Russia

Aleksei Balabanov, who has died aged 54 after suffering a seizure, saw himself as the "anti-establishment rock'n'roller of Russian film" with an aim to make "scandalous, harsh cinema". Many of Balabanov's films are metaphorical black comedies that gaze unflinchingly at the bleakness and violence of the last days of communism and post-Soviet society, with classic Russian rock music on the soundtrack. His first two features, Happy Days (1991) and The Castle (1994), were based on Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka respectively, and Balabanov's nihilistic oeuvre also takes in Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Notes of a Young Doctor was the basis of Balabanov's Morphia (2008).

"I don't make movies with ideas. Ideas make for bad cinema," he said. "I don't make my movies for the intelligentsia, but for the people. That's why they like my films." This was demonstrated by the commercial...

The Great Gatsby | Beware Of Mr Baker | Fast And Furious 6 | The Stoker | The Liability | Rangeelay

The Great Gatsby (12A)

(Baz Luhrmann, 2013, Us) Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Elizabeth Debicki. 143 mins

No one's disputing that Luhrmann can put on a show, but can he tell a story? In a way, F Scott Fitzgerald's 1920s parable is a perfect fit: a study of surfaces and seduction and the hollowness of the wealthy. The hedonism and vulgarity are ravishing to behold and the hand-tinted-photo aesthetic is gorgeous. When the fireworks die down, however, that artificiality works against the romantic tragedy, and the characters are too flat to really stir any great emotions. Maybe that's the point.

Beware Of Mr Baker (15)

(Jay Bulger, 2012, Us) 92 mins

When it comes to great rock bio-doc material, Ginger Baker doesn't disappoint on any front: prodigious talent, eventful career (Cream, Blind Faith and Fela Kuti...

Full of idiosyncratic, almost suicidal directorial choices, yet weirdly this film cuts to the heart of its country

Not to be confused with the recent Park Chan-wook/Nicole Kidman curio, but a return to UK cinemas for Russian provocateur Aleksey Balabanov, whose Of Freaks and Men gained a cult reputation in 2000. His latest is no less bizarre: a pitch-black allegory about an Afghan war veteran employed as a factory stoker. In exchange for paper on which he tentatively pecks out a novel, the stoker (Mikhail Skryabin, wryly touching) allows local heavies to burn corpses in his furnace – at least until matters get personal, and the deal requires renegotiation. It's full of idiosyncratic, almost suicidal directorial choices – a noodly guitar score, inexpressive, doll-like actors – yet weirdly cuts to the heart of a country that's been taken over by such unlovely characters. In materialistic structures, Balabanov suggests, subterranean workers and artists risk being crushed.

★★★★☆ A prime example of the complications faced by Russian films attempting to find UK support, Aleksei Balabanov's The Stoker (Kochegar, 2010) is released after three years in distribution limbo. Best known domestically for Brother (1997) and Brother 2 (2000), Balabanov is an eccentric and unpredictable director whose work, up until now, has seldom managed to escape the festival circuit. Set in 1995 in post-Soviet Saint Petersburg, The Stoker's eponymous, elderly boiler worker (the late Mikhail Skryabin) spends his days locked away in a cramped recess of an apartment block shovelling coal to keep its three furnaces burning.

In his spare time he tells stories to local children about the war, continues writing his manuscript about Russian persecution of the Yakuts and engages in small talk with his former army comrades (now local gangsters) who use his furnace as an opportune way to discard inconvenient corpses. However, just like in the story he's composing about oppression and enforced 'Russiafication',...