Ironically,
celebrated dissident poet Anna Akhmatova came through the Battle of Leningrad
relatively intact. It was the Stalinist Purges that killed her husband Nikolay
Gumilev. Nevertheless, she captured the suffering of the blockade in her
masterwork, Poem without a Hero, which
she dedicated to the victims. Her verse is among the primary sources that
director-screenwriter-producer-editor Jessica Oreck has adapted into a strange oral
history-dystopian narrative hybrid. The writings document the dark days of 1941-1944,
whereas the setting is sometime in the doomed near future, but don’t call Oreck’s
One Man Dies a Million Times science
fiction when it screens again during the 2019 SXSW Film Festival.
It
sounds awkward, but it is eerie how easily the ghostly words from the Stalinist
era fit a vaguely dystopian future time frame. It is also quite amazing how compatible
vintage Soviet architecture is with a cautionary Orwellian setting. Much of Million Times was shot in and around the
N.I. Vavilov Institute for Plant Genetic Resources, where botanists struggled
to preserve the Institute’s large repository of seeds during the Siege, for the
sake of humanity’s future—an apparently will do so again.
Alyssa
and Maksim were friends and are now lovers, as well as colleagues in botany,
but the stress and suffering of the Siege will take a toll on their
relationship. Nevertheless, they remain steadfastly committed to protecting the
seed bank and the wealth of bio-diversity it represents, especially Alyssa.
Visually,
OMDAMT is often absolutely stunning.
There is no question it represents some of the best work from indie cinematographer
extraordinaire Sean Price Williams. The use of black-and-white with occasional
flashes of color is as starkly dramatic as anything realized on-screen, maybe
since Schindler’s List. In fact,
there really is merit and substance to Oreck’s concept. She gets at something very
specific of the time and era, yet it is also a distinctively individual vision.
The drawback is diminishing marginal returns set-in pretty early during the
third act for Oreck’s hybrid-hybrid.
As
their namesakes, Alyssa Lozovskaya and Maksim Blinov look like they stepped out
of a Pawel Pawlikowski film, which is not a bad thing. The latter broods like
crazy, but it is the sensitivity of the former that will really haunt viewers.
It is pretty compelling to watch them endure dire privations, as when they boil
up soup with pieces of a leather belt.
