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.
