Venice Film Festival: Love and betrayal in Silent Souls

In Aleksei Fedorchenko’s movie, a pair of them are caged and seem like the two central characters of this extraordinarily beautiful film, one of the most striking in the competition so far.

Miron, the director of a factory, and Aist, his official photographer, sing rather less than the buntings whose cage accompanies them everywhere during the film. They are a taciturn couple, driving miles across the countryside to lay to rest Miron’s beloved wife Tanya by the sea where the pair went on honeymoon many years before.

They are the ancestors of the Merja people, assimilated into Russian culture for centuries but who still turn to their ancient rituals.
These require the body to be burned on a pyre and
ashes to be returned to the water which Merjans believe is the source of everything.

On the journey by car, Miron tells Aist how much he adored Tanya but it turns out that perhaps his obedient wife was not as faithful as he supposed.
The film, only 75 minutes long, suggests that the area from which the two men come was once prosperous but is now denuded of its former splendours, just as Miron is not bereft.

Russian road movies are rare, and very few as magnificently shot as this in the region of Lake Nero in west-central Russia.

Mikhail Crichman is the cinematographer, and he is much aided by the accompanying music of Andrei Karasyov.

The film is about both obsessive love and a fading culture. It is quietly eloquent on both counts, showing how the cinema can sometimes achieve a kind of poetry as well as prose.

Silent Souls