Far removed in both time and space from when he left Russia a week into the country’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Phillip recalls a conversation he had with his cousin a few months after he decamped for Tsibili in “A Russian Winter,” relaying to his friend and fellow refugee Margarita how disappointed he was to hear she had begun to cheer the war effort on. As the two spend a sunny afternoon in Paris, he talks about how his cousin was seemingly oblivious to who she was speaking to when she told him recently, “If only you could see Moscow… all the people who couldn’t fit in are gone.” She intended it as an enticement for him to return, but unconscious that he was one of the dissidents that she was supposedly happy to see go, it revealed to him how effective the propaganda war within Russia itself had been when relatives had become blind to what the aggression was really achieving.
Director Patric Chiha first distinguished himself in his debut feature “Brothers of the Night” a decade ago by articulating such alienation both verbally and visually when looking at a life in expatriation, following a band of young Bulgarian men who made Vienna their home. Not only did it feel like they lived in the pall cast by their former home, but they actually did operate in the shadows as sex workers when it was the only way a brighter future seemed imaginable. Those who saw how Chiha shrewdly deployed a color palette of nocturnal purples and blues creeping through windows as an extension of the surreal experience the men had as strangers in a strange land might be a little less taken aback by the arresting introduction to “A Russian Winter” where a snow-covered city is depleted of much of its color except for red hailing “Victory!” as if it were a Xerox that could bleed.
Soon it becomes obvious that in fact much of the vitality has likely left with those who have had to flee the country, although they too appear stagnant as Chiha settles into a spare flat with Yuri, 36-year-old who hasn’t put his punk days behind him. Wondering aloud if the hellraising he did as a teenager made much of an impact when he still lived in Russia as he recalls going up on stage to perform in towns where mosh pits were an uncommon occurrence, this memory he shares seems to fall on deaf ears when the young woman in the room who also left Moscow can barely pay any attention, seemingly acknowledging the all-consuming personal anxiety that plagues them both any meaningful connection when all they can think about is their own survival, and the indifference of a potential audience for the film may feel when the Russian/Ukraine conflict has carried on for so long.
Yet “A Russian Winter” offers something different between its disarming style to spare and the narrative that starts to unfold when the focus shifts from Yuri to his best friend Margarita, who is stuck in Istanbul awaiting a visa to join him in France. When she does arrive, Chiha seizes upon the airport with its “Jetsons”-esque people movers in tubes to suggest Margarita’s been transported to another planet and while it seems like gravity has been restored as the colors adjust to a more normal reality, the trepidation of fully inhabiting this new life abroad comes out in conversations Margarita has with others in her same situation, perhaps sharing the same language in a foreign country, but not necessarily in sync with one another. There are points where the disconnection could extend to an audience when the feeling of detachment is a little too potent, getting across a free-floating dread but also a feeling of aimlessness as the bohemians Chiha trains his camera on grow lethargic the greater distance they have from their native soil. However, in doing the heavy lifting of expressing what his subjects, who have seemingly been robbed of everything, cannot in a heightened reality, the director finds the gravity of the situation in a unusually affecting way.
“A Russian Winter” will screen at Berlinale on February 18th at 4 pm at Cubix 7, February 19th at 10 am at ADK am Hanseatenweg, February 21st at 10:30 pm at Cubix 5 and February 22nd at 10:15 am at Cubix 7.