As
envisioned by Alexey Fedorchenko, the real life Polina Schneider is something
like the mythical heroines of the French Resistance. She is an action figure
and an artist, who can juggle legions of lovers while remaining faithful to her
leftist ideology. Unfortunately, her latest assignment will end badly when she
tries to win over the indigenous people of western Siberia with avant-garde Soviet
art and theater in Fedorchenko’s Angels
of Revolution (trailer
here), which
screens during this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival.
Schneider
has the dash of Amelia Earhart, the crack marksmanship of Lara Croft, and the
politicized artistic soul of Simone Weil. Her Soviet masters are confident she
can stem the discontent brewing among the Khanty people and perhaps spilling
over into the neighboring Nenet. In his infinite generosity, Stalin has built
the town of Kazym, complete with a boarding school, where indigenous children
forcibly attend classes, but are forbidden from using their native tongues.
To
reach their hearts and minds, Schneider and her four male colleagues will build
atheist monuments and stage ridiculous pageants. While their revolutionary
spirits are willing, it seems their artistic talents are inadequate for the
task at hand. If you think you know where this is all heading, you are probably
right, but Fedorchenko keeps the bloodshed not wholly off-screen, but mostly
confined to the far corner of the field of vision.
It
also hardly helps that he does everything possible to chop and dice his
narrative, incorporating needlessly whimsical intertitles and injecting highly
stylized interludes. This is a fascinating yet under-reported historical incident
that would be better served by a more straight forward approach. Still, despite
its rather scattershot nature, Angels represents
a considerable rebound for Fedorchenko after his excessively sketchy and overly
precious Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari. In contrast, Angels has a
pointed perspective and it very definitely builds to something significant. Rather
than one powerful indictment of the Stalinist era, it is more like a half dozen
little nibbling critiques.
Regardless,
with his largely sympathetic treatment of the Khanty and Nenet, Fedorchenko has
established himself as the leading cinematic chronicler of Russia’s ethnic
minorities, following his earthy but lightweight ode to the Mari and the
austere but surprisingly moving Silent Souls, featuring the Merjan Russians. Fedorchenko and his co-art director
Artem Khabibulin also brilliantly recreate the Soviet constructivist madness of
the era.
