Whispering Pages

With this film, Alexander Sokurov “leafs through the pages” of a classic work of Russian prose. Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” supplies this work with its ideological theme and the historical setting, but its plot. The novel’s events and familiar characters are simply not mentioned. If anything, they are represented in an “inverse perspective,” where proximity is united with remoteness, beginning with end, the present with the absent.
The historical features of a way of life — whether they be manifested through environment or apparel — are at times presented concretely, at times merely suggested. A “physiological sketch” of the City, a literary genre of Dostoevsky’s time, is turned into a grotesque metaphor that reveals the City’s tragic essence and is extended to signify the dismal reality of our present day. Life has been reduced to its barest physical functions. The City — once “imbued with the spiritual darkness of all its convocating souls,” as seen by Pasternak in his “childish dreams” — is represented in Sokurov’s film as the womb of a beast in its final agony.
All action, all motivation here is savage and brutal; there is little place for nature and the living. For nature is the very spirit of life, and a spirit cannot inhabit lifeless flesh. In the opening images which serve as the prologue of the film, the camera glides almost imperceptibly through the City, along its skeleton: the grey, cold honeycomb facade of the ubiquitous tenement building, destined to the oppressed and destitute, whose windows, mere eyeless sockets, are reflected below in the dull waters of a torpid canal. Over this landscape, with its layers of smoke and steam, soar a few white seagulls. And along the dreary walls lining the skyless streets, a solitary young man wanders amid jostling human hordes.
He is evidently seeking something — his own lost soul or perhaps the souls of those whose lives he has destroyed in the past. Here he is kicked, knocked to the ground, dragged to his feet, pulled along by his hair… is forced to write up official documents and is enveloped by sinister mobs. Yet he eventually flees. Just as he flees from the very soul of life which appears before him one day in the guise of an “innocent girl.” He plagues this young soul with unanswerable questions when she tries to show him the way to repentance. Instead of repentance, prison follows… with all its horrors and anguish. Ultimately the young man takes refuge beneath the stony form of a chimeric beast, a token of the soulless City. He is seen pressed against its barren womb, trying to offer it some filial tenderness.
Twentieth century art has offered disturbing and hopeless views of reality. Chekhov, one of the prophets of this century, spoke of the deterioration of life and its values: “The city is dead and inhabited by the dead” — a quotation that could well be the epigraph of this film. Certainly it is not coincidental that Chekhov was the protagonist of Sokurov’s preceding film. The cultural traditions of two centuries merge into the work of this contemporary author, a Russian filmmaker.
These are the traditions of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Eisenstein. But this filmmaker does not confine himself to temporal or national limits: the film score embraces motifs of world art; isolated images employing spatial deformations hark back to German expressionist cinema; poignant close–ups of the “child–woman” are reminiscent of Griffith’s victim-heroines. In the finale we hear a woman’s voice singing Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” which serves as a requiem for the life and lives that have been wasted and for the “broken blossoms” of all times and all nations.

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