4

I've seen this film some weeks ago. When i came out of the room, I was disturbed. The first hour is pleasant, showing us a funny conversation between three persons who are tying to create something interesting about their being. Then, the long trip in the strange land where degenerated old ladies live is mind shocking, repetitive and hard to see. But the effect is clear. When you felt the isolation, the promiscuity watching Dogville, Chetyre gives you the same medication with a ten times harder concentration. A few weeks after seeing it, you keep a clear and screeching memory. This film is an experience, it brings something different, some points of view are bothering, but a strange feeling added to gorgeous landscape remain in your head after seeing it.

The screenplay of "4" is credited to edgy contemporary Russian author Vladimir Sorokin, and in case you think movies aren't serous business any more, reportedly everybody who worked on making "4" was beaten by angry viewers. It may be that Khzhanovsky went a little haywire in the latter part of the 2-hour-plus film, losing some of Sorokin's structure because he became a little too taken up with a lively and colorful group of wizened crones who are the actual inhabitants of the remote village to which protagonist Marina goes for the funeral and wake for her (twiin?) sister. Did the crones actually get drunk on the vodka they are shown swilling in the wake scene and thereafter? Was the camera-work meant to grow increasingly sloppier? Warning to young filmmakers: don't let colorful locations run away with your picture. Nonetheless this is a humdinger. Dangerous to be so provocative with your first big feature film. It made him famous (or notorious), but it was six years till he finished another film (Dau, an epic biography of the scientist Lev Landau, which is now in post-production).

The film begins slowly but intriguingly with a half-hour sequence of three people telling lies to each other at an after hours bar, inventing fantastic occupations. Marina, who is a whore, pretends to be in advertising. A stylish, somewhat effete man who is really a meat dealer claims to purvey spring water to the president. The other man, deadpan chain smoker with a crewcut who later admits to Marina he's a piano tuner, tells a preposterous and revolting story about being a geneticist involved in cloning of humans that he claims has gone on since the Stalin era. "4" refers to the habit of cloning double twins. When he gets into a tale of homosexual rape among black clones in a slum the meat broker goes off in a huff. His discovery of "round" piglets sold at a fancy restaurant is assurance, if needed, that "4' is bizarre and surreal. Everybody has written about it. The Times called it "mysterious" and "mesmerizing," and Jonothan Rosenbaum wrote about it favorably (though I can't access his review -- some of the online archives don't go back as far as 2005 or 2006).

Although at the one-hour mark, with the film half over, things only are beginning to happen, and that's not very good, the opening sequence at the bar, even if over- long, is atmospheric and intriguing. One excellent and admiring review by Ty Burr of the Boston Globe described the scene as a surreal, futuristic Russian version of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" "come to life with a script by a post modernist prankster"(and Burr identifies Sorokin as "one of the more controversial voices in post-Soviet literature"). But it's scary and provocative rather than dreary. It's interesting to begin with three characters who are quite mysterious. Unfortunately the film delves into the meat broker's life only briefly, and the pretend geneticist piano tuner not at all. Perhaps it was best to stick to one of the three, to give the film unified focus, but it still makes things feel structurally left dangling. Doubtless the round pigs, the shaggy-dog bar conversations, the Stalin-era meat preserved in a vast freezer at 28º (below?), the large dolls whose heads are made of chewed bread, are all products of the fevered imagination of Vladimir Sorokin. So too are the repetitions of doubling, doubling scenes, twins, the fantastic clone tales, hinting that the world has gone mad and gone bad. Unfortunately the barking dogs, the endless trek cross-country to a wake peopled by colorful locals already had the quality of déjâ-vu, maybe because I've recently seen similar sequences in Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and the Bulgarian Konstantin Bojanov's Avé, and I think I've seen it before that. I'll bet Emir Kosturica did some sequence like this somewhere. This movie is accomplished, ambitious in its eccentricity. Some of it nonetheless reminded me of Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers. And it made me appreciate Sokurov and Zvyagintsev even more, and, in a more popular vein, Bekmambetov, who's an entertainer and a technical dazzler, and no slouch in the surrealism department. Certainly, though, "4" is very much in the Russian vein. The sound design, though typically grating and overblown, is technically the film's most original aspect.

Was this Andy Warhol's "Pets or Meat" ? or Henry Jaglom's "Motel Hell"? Possibly Mike Leigh's "Night of the Living Dead"? Anyway, this film has my nomination for best ever use of clones with crones, and also for best use of crones overall. Did you know that if you play this film it matches up very well with Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain"? No? Well maybe it doesn't but it should! Try it!

I found this film consistently involving even though it became increasingly unpleasant and difficult to categorize or interpret. It appeared to have two distinct halves, each with different pacing and tone. The lively and stimulating first half took place in the city (Moscow?) and showed the stories of several characters unfolding. The 2nd half focused on one character and a separate set of people she knew in the country (until the very ending bits). This 2nd half was more claustrophobic, squalid, and disturbing.

After the Seattle 2005 screening during the Q/A session with the director, one Russian woman ranted at him for an act of "treason" in this disturbing portrayal of Russian life, and said it and he were "dirty!", asking him where he lived *now*, he must have been well paid for this, etc. He responded that unlike her he still lived in Russia, that in fact life was *harder* than he portrayed and that Russians drank *more* than he portrayed, etc. After she walked out, he explained that her reaction was typical of the culturally *soviet* people in Russia, who were brought up to always present the best face of Russia at all times.

I am not sure about this movie. In the beginning there was a long conversation in a bar. This conversation was so amazingly good. It really intrigued me and kept my interest.

Though I was watching this movie on a Saturday night. Normally I can keep focused even when a movie is a bit boring. This movie though was so amazingly boring that none of us could keep focused.

While chatting with each other I saw only parts of the movie and saw some really interesting camera shots. Also there were really weird, shocking parts and funny parts. The movie is real slow though.

For what I saw I would recommend this movie to people who like B-movies, independent and artistic movies. Though even then you should watch it on a dull Sunday or something.

For all other people I just wouldn't recommend this movie, because they won't like it. Personally I might be watching this movie again sometime as I was intrigued by it and am still wondering what was the real clue of the movie.

Don't worry, I'm not going to give away the ending- couldn't even if I wanted to. Not really sure what the ending was, the screen went black & the house lights went up but that was the only clue I had the the "story" was over. Let me put it this way- during one scene an entire row of people got up and left muttering things like "This isn't a movie! I don't know what this was but how dare he!" and "Go back to Russia" That's when I knew that the director was really on to something. Again, not really sure what he is on to or into for that matter but this movie is definitely worth seeing. It's beautifully shot, one scene more enthralling than the previous one, the acting is great especially since I don't think any of the actors are actually actors & the sound & music brought on an acid flashback. All pluses in my book. It's not for the faint of heart or vegetarians. Good luck. (FYI- my spell check tells me that I write at a 6th grade level so what do I know-)