This imaginative speculation about Russian poet Joseph Brodsky is a resonant, beautifully made film, writes Peter Bradshaw
Andrey Khrzhanovsky's rich, resonant and deeply satisfying movie is a fantasy about the life of Joseph Brodsky, the dissident poet expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, who came to enjoy fame and a Nobel prize in the west. The film fantasises about Brodsky passionately delving into the memories of youth in St Petersburg: this upstream journey back in time happens in parallel with a (wholly fictional) attempt to return to Russia and to his beloved parents. Part of the film's message is that we are all exiles – banished, Housman-like, from the country of our past. Khrzhanovsky's camera gives the poet's youth a dewy, soft-focus look, switching to a nouvelle vagueish monochrome as he becomes the rebellious poet and hipster and finally a neutral documentary feel, as the aged Brodsky appears in the post-Soviet...
Andrey Khrzhanovsky's rich, resonant and deeply satisfying movie is a fantasy about the life of Joseph Brodsky, the dissident poet expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, who came to enjoy fame and a Nobel prize in the west. The film fantasises about Brodsky passionately delving into the memories of youth in St Petersburg: this upstream journey back in time happens in parallel with a (wholly fictional) attempt to return to Russia and to his beloved parents. Part of the film's message is that we are all exiles – banished, Housman-like, from the country of our past. Khrzhanovsky's camera gives the poet's youth a dewy, soft-focus look, switching to a nouvelle vagueish monochrome as he becomes the rebellious poet and hipster and finally a neutral documentary feel, as the aged Brodsky appears in the post-Soviet...
- 5/6/2010
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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