-By Kirk Honeycutt
For movie details, please click here.
This Russian film is about as different as you can get from
standard-issue Hollywood biopics. Andrey Khrzhanovsky, a veteran
animator in both Soviet and post-Soviet-era Russia, makes a smooth
feature debut with A Room and a Half, a freeform look at the life
of exiled Russian poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky
(1940-1996).
The film mixes archival footage, different styles of animation and
nostalgic re-enactments of Brodsky's life to render an artistic,
fulfilling but melancholy life of a man forced to live in exile in
the U.S. after the Soviets kicked him out in 1972. He never saw his
aging parents again.
The movie imagines that he did travel by luxury liner back to his
hometown of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) for a final visit with his
parents. En route, he reminiscences about his childhood and
activities as a young man, but the focus lands solidly on the love
between this only child and his parents.
Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy, a dead ringer for Brodsky—the real man is
glimpsed in an old newsreel—plays the writer with a gentle-sad
longing for what was but can never be reclaimed. As a young man, he
seems fascinated by Western culture, as is most of his crowd. His
love life consists of a series of young women introduced to his
parents and then escorted behind a curtain in their claustrophobic
room-and-a-half flat.
Little is done to establish Brodsky's importance as a poet. Indeed,
for non-Russian speakers the frustration is that the visuals tend
to overwhelm the words and those words get translated into white
subtitles often lost against white backgrounds. (When will
subtitlists learn that you must use yellow letters if they are to
be seen against all backgrounds?)
This is therefore a limited glimpse of a famous writer, showing
little about his American experiences and almost nothing about his
creative life. Rather, it's an exile's lament, a vivid
demonstration that you cannot remove Russia from the soul of a
Russian no matter where he lives.
Alisa Freindlich and Sergei Yurskiy, who play the parents, grab
most of the camera's attention while the whimsical animation, from
cats to floating musical instruments, dominates the visual side of
the movie.
-
The Hollywood Reporter
Film Review: A Room and a Half
A fanciful and melancholy portrait of exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky.
Jan 19, 2010
-By Kirk Honeycutt
For movie details, please click here.
This Russian film is about as different as you can get from standard-issue Hollywood biopics. Andrey Khrzhanovsky, a veteran animator in both Soviet and post-Soviet-era Russia, makes a smooth feature debut with A Room and a Half, a freeform look at the life of exiled Russian poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996).
The film mixes archival footage, different styles of animation and nostalgic re-enactments of Brodsky's life to render an artistic, fulfilling but melancholy life of a man forced to live in exile in the U.S. after the Soviets kicked him out in 1972. He never saw his aging parents again.
The movie imagines that he did travel by luxury liner back to his hometown of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) for a final visit with his parents. En route, he reminiscences about his childhood and activities as a young man, but the focus lands solidly on the love between this only child and his parents.
Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy, a dead ringer for Brodsky—the real man is glimpsed in an old newsreel—plays the writer with a gentle-sad longing for what was but can never be reclaimed. As a young man, he seems fascinated by Western culture, as is most of his crowd. His love life consists of a series of young women introduced to his parents and then escorted behind a curtain in their claustrophobic room-and-a-half flat.
Little is done to establish Brodsky's importance as a poet. Indeed, for non-Russian speakers the frustration is that the visuals tend to overwhelm the words and those words get translated into white subtitles often lost against white backgrounds. (When will subtitlists learn that you must use yellow letters if they are to be seen against all backgrounds?)
This is therefore a limited glimpse of a famous writer, showing little about his American experiences and almost nothing about his creative life. Rather, it's an exile's lament, a vivid demonstration that you cannot remove Russia from the soul of a Russian no matter where he lives.
Alisa Freindlich and Sergei Yurskiy, who play the parents, grab most of the camera's attention while the whimsical animation, from cats to floating musical instruments, dominates the visual side of the movie.
-
The Hollywood Reporter
