Poetry and politics in Russia

The reason Khrzhanovsky is largely unknown here is at least partly because the Russian cinema, traditionally one of the finest in the world, has received such short shrift from wary British distributors since the death of Tarkovsky, generally reckoned to be one of the giants of post-war cinema.

Khrzhanovsky's extraordinary film about Brodsky is not an orthodox documentary about the poet and essayist whose work was so highly regarded. It is, however, a film that's typical of the man who made it. Mixing documentary with fictional footage and animation, it tells the story of a brilliant man who loved Russia and, in particular, his St Petersburg home, and never forgot the parents who helped him survive during the German siege of the city.

In the mid-Sixties, Brodsky was charged with "social parasitism" and sentenced to internal exile during a ludicrous trial in which the judge asked him who on earth had told him he was a poet. In 1972, he was exiled from his native country altogether and ended up in the United States. During his time in America, Brodsky tried desperately to get permission either to visit his parents in Russia or to get them a visa to visit him in America. But he never saw them again and died in New York in 1996.

In Khrzhanovsky's film, however, Brodsky travels triumphantly up the Neva River to his former "room and a half" home to share with them a love of homeland many Russian Jews might find difficult to believe.

Khrzhanovsky has plenty of evidence of Brodsky's obsession with home and family, culled from his poems and essays, and his freeform film is itself rather like an essay about the man which locates the essence of his life and work in childhood memories. Three actors play Brodsky who, when asked about his antecedents, replied: "I am Jewish — a Russian poet and an English essayist."
Essentially, Brodsky believed in the power of both poetry and literature to change society for the better.

This Khrzhanovsky acknowledges. But his film also suggests that the power of cinema has some of the same force too. He has had a long career attempting to prove it, and one that often ran in the opposite direction to the kind of Disneyfied Russian animation of the Sixties and Seventies.
Among his many films, often frowned upon by the authorities but awarded many national and international prizes, are the early There Was a Man Called Kozyavin, a fable about senseless bureaucracy and a series of stories culled from Pushkin's notebooks.

In A Room and a Half (the title is taken from a famous Brodsky essay), Khrzhanovsky flings caution to the winds with animated representations of the young Brodsky's cat and surrealist interludes that remind us both of Chagall and Magritte.

"For my generation," says Brodsky amusingly at one point in the film, "freedom starts with Tarzan." But at another he says more seriously: "This is the main tragedy of Russian life — the people's colossal disrespect for one another, along with contempt and lack of compassion."
Clearly, Brodsky and Khrzhanovsky are kindred souls — deadly serious but also playfully and sometimes mischievously non-conformist, like the film itself.

A Room and a Half is released on May 7. Q&As with director Andrey Khrzhanovsky and actress Alisa Freindlich follow a special screening at the Everyman Hampstead (0870 0664777, www.everymancinema.com) on May 6 and a gala premiere on May 7 at Curzon Mayfair (0871 7033989, www.curzoncinemas.com); they will also be at Ciné Lumière (7073 1350, www.institut-francais.org.uk) on May 10.