Compartment No. 6

 It's 985 miles between Moscow and Murmansk.  You can drive or take the train, the so-called Artika.  The trip by train takes 30 hours.  Murmansk is directly north of Moscow.  As we learn in Compartment No. 6, the two cities occupy the same time zone.  This 2021 film is a Finnish-Russian-Estonian production, produced before the war in Ukraine rendered most of Russia's current cultural productions problematic.  Compartment no. 6 is a rather bleak, but intriguing, odd couple story involving a young Finnish woman who finds herself sharing the titular train compartment with an uncouth Russian miner, both of them bound for Murmansk -- she plans to see some pictographs chiseled into stones on an icy seaside; the young man is going to work in an enormous mine.  The journey takes place during Winter and its dark, snowy, and the cold is bone-chilling.  The picture invokes romantic comedy motifs but is more dark and, ultimately, unresolved and enigmatic.

We first meet the Finnish girl, Laura, at a party coming out of a toilet.  (This opening shot is an example of the film's reversal of ordinary romantic imagery.)  The party is loud with drunken Russians, all intellectuals it seems, performing for one another.  We discover that Laura is the girlfriend and lover of the hostess, a cold bitch named Irina.  Laura and Irina have planned to travel north to Murmansk to see the petroglyphs but, at the last minute, Irina says that she has to work, insisting the Laura go without her.  (This is clearly an extremely cruel ruse to get Laura out of the picture so that Irina can end the relationship.)  Laura naively boards the train bound to Murmansk, assigned a second-class sleeper compartment that turns out to be occupied by Lyokha.  Lyokha has a smirk on his face, seems to be half-drunk on vodka that he swills from the bottle, and acts menacing -- his head is shaven like a convict or soldier.  He assumes that Laura is a prostitute traveling to service the miners in Murmansk and rants about Russia's greatness.  But, as it turns out, he's considerably more complicated than first appearances would suggest and, after making an initial bad impression on Laura, grows more sympathetic as the film progresses.  At first, Laura refuses to share the claustrophobic compartment with him.  She tries to get reassigned but the train is full and, so, she has to spend as much time as possible sitting in the restaurant car to avoid Lyokha.  During a couple stops made by the train, Laura and Lyokha talk.  She's reckless and independent and not intimidated by Lyokha; she just finds he's a boorish annoyance.  Reluctantly, she accompanies him to visit an elderly woman during a layover in a small subarctic village.  (It's not clear how the woman is related to Lyokha.)  The two women get drunk and the babushka tells Laura to listen to the "little animal living inside of her".  In the morning, Lyokha chops firewood for the old woman and, then, they rush back to the train.  A Finnish traveler joins them and Lyokha sulks -- he thinks Laura will end up sleeping with the man and he's become possessive of her.  In fact, the Finnish guy who annoyingly strums guitar and sings wordlessly (and tunelessly) as he plays, turns out to be petty criminal -- he steals Laura's video recorder on which she is filming a record of her trip.  (The movie, based on a Finnish novel, seems to take place in the late 80's -- there are no cell-phones.)  Laura calls Irina several times only to be given the cold shoulder; Irina seems to be entertaining a male friend in her apartment.  Lyokha is upset about the interlude with the Finnish tourist and doesn't talk to Laura until they are close to Murmansk.  To celebrate the end of the long train ride, they go to the restaurant car, drink some champagne, but can't really eat -- the train's commissary is out of food. Back in the compartment, Laura kisses Lyokha but he disengages with her, apparently not willing to start a relationship that is doomed.  In Murmansk, it turns out that there is no practical way to get to the pictograph site.  The route requires both a trip by car and, then, water -- and neither are feasible in the bitterly cold and stormy weather.  In fact, it turns out that there was never really anyway to get to the pictographs during the cold season.  Laura takes a "hero-city historical tour" and, then, goes to the enormous mine where Lyokha is employed.  She leaves a note for him.  Lyokha meets her and has arranged a driver to take them to the pictographs notwithstanding the bad weather.  They travel all night and reach what seems to be the seashore in the early morning.  A gale is approaching.  They rent a small boat and travel across the water to a rocky promontory.   Laura wanders around in the frigid wind looking at the rocks while Lyokha smokes -- everyone smokes a lot in this movie.  (We never see the pictographs; they seem to be invisible to the camera.)   A blizzard blows up and Lyokha and Laura wander along the deserted seacoast, playing in smashed boats.  The driver takes Lyokha  and Laura back to the mine -- he's apparently used his weekend to take Laura to the rock carvings.  He sends her a note written in Finnish:  "I love you."  

The movie is spectacularly dreary.  The trains seem noisome, crowded with the third class customers bedding down in horrible-looking corridors.  Old women stand on the platforms selling pickles in big jars.  The towns are all shabby, dark, grey, with rows of lights barely illuminating the perpetual twilight.  The seacoast is nondescript with big, icy waves, frozen puddles, and patches of flat black rock apparently decorated with pecked pictographic engravings.  As the movie progresses, no one can bathe and the Finnish girl becomes increasingly disheveled, her hair stringy and greasy.  However, both characters are appealingly vulnerable, open to new experiences, and kind.  It's implied, I think, that there's no hope for the relationship -- Laura may be a lesbian and she and the young man have nothing in common.  But they form a brief, fleeting bond and this is sufficient to retain the audience's sympathy and interest.  The film won many prizes and was directed by Juho Kuosmanen -- it's shot in monochrome documentary style and conveys very vividly the arduous nature of the train trip.  (The Murmansk pictographs are actually on an island in a large Arctic lake, Lake Kanozero; they are estimated to be 5000 years old and are notable for being "cartoons", that is, mini-narratives pecked into the stone.  They were only recently discovered -- in 1997. The movie shows the pictographs located, apparently, in a bay on the White Sea.)