I watched the Russian film Silent Souls (2010) last night. The film is a mainline injection into those veins through which dreams circulate. I awoke before dawn arguing with a scene in the movie, something about a throng of Meryon people, an ethnic group in west-central Russia, gathered together in a sort of crater for some sinister reason. I was convinced that this scene was a part of the movie, although I couldn't exactly grasp how it informed the picture's subject matter, broadly speaking an account of exotic mortuary practices in that community. But since the scene doesn't exist in the movie, of course, the argument was fruitless. Silent Souls affects you in such a way as to render it impossible to distinguish between what you saw in the movie, what you thought you saw and now remember, and what you may have only dreamed. Shot on a micro-budget and only 75 minutes long, the film is strangely memorable and, also, deeply disorienting. It's a curious experience, so remote from everyday reality and concerns, that it, somehow, embeds itself in your imagination as a troubling foreign object, an irritant that can't quite be dislodged.
Silent Souls is the film's English title. The Russian name for the picture is The Buntings, referring to a species of small, rather drab songbirds. (The movie derives from a novel of that same name.) The picture begins with a man named Aist riding his bicycle over a muddy lane in the woods. Aist has bought two buntings that he carries in a cage suspended from his bike. The camera either tracks behind him, shoots from his vantage rolling forward , or shows the lane receding behind the moving bicycle in long takes. Throughout the film about a third of the shots show the buntings in their cage, generally at the center of the image. Since the film is a kind of "road movie" about half of the images are shots from inside a moving car, unobtrusively composed to show the road from the vantage of the driver and passenger or, as with the introductory bicycle shots, watching the highway as it recedes behind the vehicle. The landscape traversed is wooded and flat; there are enormous turgid-looking rivers. The weather is perpetually drizzly and grey. (We learn from the dialogue that it is an unseasonably warm November.) Aist is a writer, the son of a "very odd man" (as he calls his father) who was also a notable regional poet. Aist claims to be ethnically Meryon, explaining that these were Finnic tribes long since wholly absorbed into the local Slavic population. Aist says that place names in this area are artifacts of Meryon words that have otherwise vanished. Aist works as a photographer and has some sort of affiliation with a paper mill in the town of Neya, one of many villages that have Meryon roots. We see him in the paper mill taking pictures of female workers -- perhaps, he has been commissioned to make a plant directory although this is pure speculation; the film is very focused, laconic and doesn't provide any real explanations for much of what we see. Aist flirts with one of the women. We see him in his gloomy flat, trying to write on a laptop. One wall is covered with a photo-montage that shows the nearby village and terrain pieced together from individual photographs. This photo-montage rhymes with a huge photographic mural of the paper mill that covers a wall in the office of the plant manager, Miron, the picture's other protagonist. The mural of paper-mill is strangely lit, surrealistically detailed, and imparts an aura of the uncanny to the scenes with Miron.
Miron calls Aist to his office and tells him that he needs his help. Miron says that his wife Tanya has died. The two men go to Miron's home where Tanya's naked corpse is lying on the bed. Miron combs her hair and washes her body, apparently with vodka. Then, the men tie colored threads into her pubic hair -- we are told that Meryon brides have their pubic hair adorned with threads of this sort that are removed by the groom, woven into a bracelet and, then, tied to an alder tree. This is represented to be a Meryon wedding custom that is also used in burial ceremonies -- dead Meryon women are buried as brides. The two men carry the corpse in a colorful blanket to Miron's car and, then. set out along empty highways, driving through the great, grim-looking forests. The movie has almost no plot and there are no intriguing digressions or encounters along the way to the vast, shallow river where the two men set the dead woman on a funeral pyre, pour gallons of high-proof vodka on her and burn the corpse to ashes. (The river is near the place where Miron and Tanya spent their honeymoon.) Returning to Neya, they stop in a big city where they meet two prostitutes and spend the night with them. The next morning, Miron and Aist are driving across an enormous bridge over a river when the buntings escape from their cage and "kiss" (as Aist, the narrator says) the eyes of the two men causing the driver to lose control of the car and crash it into the river. In the depths of the mile-wide icy river, Miron merges with Tanya whose ashes were scattered in the water; Aist finds his father's lost typewriter and on which he types the novel The Buntings (the movie' source text) "on the side of a fish." The old typewriter is at the bottom of the river due to an earlier death. The film flashes back (although without immediate explanation) to Aist's childhood. His mother died in childbirth and, with his father, the "odd poet", they row across one of the huge rivers with the corpse wrapped in a blanket. Later, Aist's father, smitten with grief, cuts a hole in the ice of the river and "drowns" his typewriter -- it is this instrument that the Aist, who is himself drowned, later encounters. (The scenes with the young Aist are heavily stylized: we see the boy's saturnine face artificially lit while a rear-projection shows the landscape of the river over which Aist's father, like Charon, is conveying the corpse of his mother and dead infant sister.)
Although the movie purports to objectively portray the mortuary customs of the Meryon people, I suspect that many of those details are hallucinated. The texture of the film suggests documentary realism, but what happens in the picture is uncanny and follows the logic of a dream. Miron feels compelled to engage in what the Meryon's call "smoking" -- that is, recounting the sexual exploits of the deceased in graphic detail. (The director Aleksei Fedorchenko provides us with a few sentences of these obscene reveries, but, then, discretely cuts away to an exterior shot of the car; we see Miron's lips moving but can't hear what he says.) Tanya's pyre is comprised of 120 shovel handles, 80 long axe-handles and 20 short axe-handles -- all purchased in a hardware store somewhere. Tanya is a plump, pink corpse -- she doesn't look even remotely dead and there is no hint of decomposition or any sign of the illness that has untimely killed her: she seems to be about 45. (Her body shows no rigor mortis and, when she is rolled over to be washed, there is no sign of blood pooling on the back of the corpse.) The prostitutes are portrayed in a peculiar tracking shot that pans up over their naked bodies as they rest against what seems to be a wall of slatted timber, something that you might imagine in a building by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. There is a slight intimation that Aist may have had an affair with Tanya, but nothing overt is shown. (There are some graphic sex scenes in flashback.) The long bridge at the end of the movie rhymes with a very strange, crooked bridge crossing a more narrow river at the beginning of the film -- crossing water and bridges seems emblematic of death. The men attempt to retrieve ancient Meryon customs but, in fact, everyone seems to acknowledge that nothing really is known about those people -- no words in the language (except the names for rivers) have survived. The script equates love with poetry with drowning with death. Death by drowning is said to be the best way to perish and large, shallow bodies of water fill enormous basins extending out to rims of pine at the horizon. The towns through which the men pass are all wretched with decaying wooden houses and antique concrete and steel factories set in clearings in an endless green pine forest. The bodies of women are said to be rivers in which men drown or wish to drown. The film expresses the forbidden thought -- namely that there should be no death, that our loved ones should be immortal, and we should live in joy and peace with them forever. But no sooner is the forbidden thought spoken than the buntings peck out the eyes of the men and send them careening into the bottom of the river. Nothing is immortal; everything flows and ebbs and wanes and passes away. The film argues that the ancient Meryon culture somehow persists in its customs and folkways. But the movie argues with equal force that nothing at all remains of those people but their blood, the landscapes where they once lived, and a few fragmentary names for bodies of water. (There is a German poet named Johannes Bobrowski who wrote, at length, about the lost tribes of the Baltic, particularly the Sarmatians -- although he invokes their ancestral spirits, he also must acknowledge that nothing remains except a few words for fish, birds, rivers. Other antecedents to the film include Sokurov's The Second Circle in which someone has to manhandle the corpse of his father out of a cheerless high-rise apartment building in Moscow and Tarkovsky's great The Mirror.) Although the picture seems to take place in a timeless realm of vast slow-moving rivers, muddy river banks and sand bars, and dark forests, some of the shots are made in what seem like the Russian equivalent of Walmart and, in the final scenes, heavy traffic crosses rivers into large, dark cities.
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