‘Leto’ a fast-paced musical biopic
Detained Russian director gets standing ovation at Cannes
CANNES, France, May 10, (Agencies): A new film by the enfant terrible of Russian theatre — who is under house arrest in Moscow — received a standing ovation and rave reviews Thursday after it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
The cast of Kirill Serebrennikov’s “Leto”, a fastpaced biopic of the Soviet-Korean rock legend Viktor Tsoi, were cheered as the movie premiered at the world’s top film festival.
Influential US critic David Ehrlich of the IndieWire website called it “a sort of ‘24 Hour Party People’ for the early 1980s Leningrad underground rock scene”.
“Exuberant, shapeless, gorgeous long-takes galore, a ‘psycho killer’ singalong, the end of an era. I dug it,” he tweeted of the movie, which features music by Lou Reed, David Bowie and Blondie.
The head of the French film board was equally ecstatic, calling it a “Russian ‘Trainspotting’. This is roll ‘n’ roll,” said Christophe Tardieu.
Festival director Thierry Fremaux had earlier held up a white placard with the director’s name as the cast climbed the steps of the red carpet to the cinema.
A seat was left symbolically empty inside for Serebrennikov, who has been under house arrest on embezzlement charges since last August.
He has dismissed the charges as “absurd” and his supporters see them as political.
Serebrennikov’s detention has sent shockwaves through the Russian arts world.
The 48-year-old has revolutionised Moscow’s theatre scene with radical stagings of new plays and by reinventing classics.
Although he has never openly criticised Russian President Vladimir Putin, Serebrennikov has attacked the growing pressure being put on artists in Russia.
He has also won prizes at the Cannes and Rome film festivals, while his 2012 film “Betrayal” was nominated for the prestigious Golden Lion at Venice.
“Leto”, which means summer, is in the running for Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or.
It tells the story of Tsoi, whose songs are seen in Russia as anthems of the late 1980s Perestroika era.
Filmmakers working in the rock music realm often have a fine needle to thread: When portraying a world of self-indulgence, how closely can they enter into the spirit of things before becoming self-indulgent themselves? In “Leto,” his sprawling, chaotically shaped ode to the underground Leningrad rock scene of the 1980s, gifted Serebrennikov only sporadically finds the sweet spot, landing on stray moments of both human tenderness and musical euphoria in a bemusing blizzard of assorted characters, styles and songs that often tips over into outright kitsch. Embellishing with numerous fictional details the true story of influential, tragically short-lived Soviet singer-songwriter Tsoi, “Leto” happily avoids the bland structural pitfalls of the musical biopic, but also provides outsiders with few entry points to its rather niche milieu. The scene is the star here, and Serebrennikov is more concerned that we experience it than understand it.
Austerity
That conflicting blend of austerity and excess makes “Leto” an exceedingly tough sell to international distributors — even those who took a chance on Serebrennikov’s more rigorous last film, “The Student” — despite the luster of the embattled director’s first Cannes competition berth. He presented “Leto” on the Croisette in absentia, having been placed under house arrest in Russia last year on charges of corruption that have been much-contended by his artistic peers. If not as overtly political as “The Student,” “Leto” nonetheless represents about as flamboyant a statement of free artistic expression as Serebrennikov could make at this moment: There’s certainly nothing contained or inhibited about its celebration of artists who themselves were given little support or leeway by the Soviet government.
The film begins with one of several exhilarating sequence shots, tracking a throng of musos and fans as they invade the shabby backstage labyrinth of the Leningrad Rock Club. One of the few state-permitted public performance spaces for rock musicians, the Club becomes one of “Leto’s” recurring hubs of frenzied activity — thanks to expert work by production designer Andrey Ponkratov, you can practically feel the sweat saturating the wallpaper. It’s a quaintly theatrical venue for boundary-pushing music, where audiences are instructed to sit politely and listen rather than mosh. Only in one of multiple dips into extravagant hedonist fantasy — a running device, with an occasional narrator billed only as Skeptic (Alexander Kuznetsov) as our guide between dimensions — does it become the reckless, dangerous, smashed-guitar dive we’d expect in a western version of this tale. “Leto’s” musicians live frugally; their indulgences are creative rather than material.
Serebrennikov, working with co-writers Michael Idov and Lily Idova, takes his time identifying key figures in the swaying, thrumming mass. For a time the focus of the loose-limbed narrative appears to be Mike (Roman Bilyk), the frontman of one of the Club’s more popular, old-guard bands, and his sweetly devoted girlfriend Natacha (Irina Starshenbaum), whose close, initially monogamous relationship again represents, as others around them note with mirth, a straitlaced inversion of expected rock-star behavior. Yet as we hang at leisure with Mike and his crowd, the film drifting nearseamlessly from backstage antics through summer picnics and jam sessions, he grows more rather than less elusive; “Leto” is clearly awaiting another star, which arrives in the modest form of Viktor (Teo Yoo), a quiet, slightly otherworldly young man with a knack for melody and a beguilingly peculiar turn of lyrical phrase.
Natacha, the closest thing these itching, wayward proceedings have to a guiding perspective, is the first to notice a kind of melancholic magic about Viktor, as the film gradually reorients itself around his budding stardom rather than Mike’s less obviously ascending career. Yet it never becomes a close-up portrait, preferring to move with the fevered, irregular rhythms of the group around them, sometimes zeroing in on peripheral figures as they whir near the flame and then back out. The film’s musical numbers, which alternate between diegetic stage performances and sudden flights of music-video fancy, are not so much narratively determined as random releases of accumulated energy.