Silent Souls - Review

Awarded the International Critics Prize at Venice the year before last, Aleksei Fedorchenko’s magical little film has taken a long time to reach us. But don’t miss it. It is an hour-plus of pure poetry and certainly one of the best Russian films of recent years.

The story is very simple but also adorned with a multitude of subtleties. It is set at first in and around the remote town of Neya, where traces of an ancient Merjan culture are still in evidence. A former factory employee’s wife has died and he and his best friend, our narrator, who may or may not have been in love with the woman, set off on a long road trip to the sea in a rickety van to bury her in the Merjan manner.

They take along some caged bunting birds (Buntings was the title of the original Russian story by Aist Sergeyev), and they burn her body in a pyre by the sea, collect the ashes and throw them in the water.

This superb sequence marks out Silent Souls as something special, infinitely moving but with humour at the same time.

When the pair return through Molochai, a once thriving city now virtually derelict, we have learned some secrets, sometimes through flashbacks, on the way.

Beautifully shot by Mikhail Krichman and acted by Igor Sergeev and Yuriy Tsurilo with great restraint and a wonderful sense of the story as a very real folk tale, it becomes a road movie of sorts. It also announces Fedorchenko as a match for Sokurov and even Tarkovsky — it’s hard to imagine that either could have accomplished this film better.