4 (2005)

Beautiful, moving film.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The screenplay of "4" is credited to edgy contemporary Russian author Vladimir Sorokin, and in case you think movies aren't serous business any more, reportedly everybody who worked on making "4" was beaten by angry viewers. It may be that Khzhanovsky went a little haywire in the latter part of the 2-hour-plus film, losing some of Sorokin's structure because he became a little too taken up with a lively and colorful group of wizened crones who are the actual inhabitants of the remote village to which protagonist Marina goes for the funeral and wake for her (twiin?) sister. Did the crones actually get drunk on the vodka they are shown swilling in the wake scene and thereafter? Was the camera-work meant to grow increasingly sloppier? Warning to young filmmakers: don't let colorful locations run away with your picture. Nonetheless this is a humdinger. Dangerous to be so provocative with your first big feature film. It made him famous (or notorious), but it was six years till he finished another film (Dau, an epic biography of the scientist Lev Landau, which is now in post-production). The film begins slowly but intriguingly with a half-hour sequence of three people telling lies to each other at an after hours bar, inventing fantastic occupations. Marina, who is a whore, pretends to be in advertising. A stylish, somewhat effete man who is really a meat dealer claims to purvey spring water to the president. The other man, deadpan chain smoker with a crewcut who later admits to Marina he's a piano tuner, tells a preposterous and revolting story about being a geneticist involved in cloning of humans that he claims has gone on since the Stalin era. "4" refers to the habit of cloning double twins. When he gets into a tale of homosexual rape among black clones in a slum the meat broker goes off in a huff. His discovery of "round" piglets sold at a fancy restaurant is assurance, if needed, that "4' is bizarre and surreal. Everybody has written about it. The Times called it "mysterious" and "mesmerizing," and Jonothan Rosenbaum wrote about it favorably (though I can't access his review -- some of the online archives don't go back as far as 2005 or 2006). Although at the one-hour mark, with the film half over, things only are beginning to happen, and that's not very good, the opening sequence at the bar, even if over- long, is atmospheric and intriguing. One excellent and admiring review by Ty Burr of the Boston Globe described the scene as a surreal, futuristic Russian version of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" "come to life with a script by a post modernist prankster"(and Burr identifies Sorokin as "one of the more controversial voices in post-Soviet literature"). But it's scary and provocative rather than dreary. It's interesting to begin with three characters who are quite mysterious. Unfortunately the film delves into the meat broker's life only briefly, and the pretend geneticist piano tuner not at all. Perhaps it was best to stick to one of the three, to give the film unified focus, but it still makes things feel structurally left dangling. Doubtless the round pigs, the shaggy-dog bar conversations, the Stalin-era meat preserved in a vast freezer at 28º (below?), the large dolls whose heads are made of chewed bread, are all products of the fevered imagination of Vladimir Sorokin. So too are the repetitions of doubling, doubling scenes, twins, the fantastic clone tales, hinting that the world has gone mad and gone bad. Unfortunately the barking dogs, the endless trek cross-country to a wake peopled by colorful locals already had the quality of déjâ-vu, maybe because I've recently seen similar sequences in Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and the Bulgarian Konstantin Bojanov's Avé, and I think I've seen it before that. I'll bet Emir Kosturica did some sequence like this somewhere. This movie is accomplished, ambitious in its eccentricity. Some of it nonetheless reminded me of Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers. And it made me appreciate Sokurov and Zvyagintsev even more, and, in a more popular vein, Bekmambetov, who's an entertainer and a technical dazzler, and no slouch in the surrealism department. Certainly, though, "4" is very much in the Russian vein. The sound design, though typically grating and overblown, is technically the film's most original aspect.

I have just seen this film by Russian DVD. Technically it is a very interesting film. It is a really a contemporary cinema art, in the sense that we now live in the time after the cold war, after the end of typical genre films and studio system.This film has nothing in common with classic cinema before 1980s. From aesthetic point of view it is a clearest example of a Russian postmodernist cinema,which has existed. in fact, from 1980s.Before the beginning of the Perestroika such a stream was limited in the circle of independent filmmakers and officially banned films of some directors. Now almost all the films of that trend is available to Russian and foreign people. Yes, they are not banned, people can see such films on VHS or DVDs,if not in theaters. I wonder if contemporary Russian film-goers can see in this work someone sympathetic to, or even somewhat common with, themselves.Well, we have heard and read about the Past of Soviet Union, cruelty of the totalitarian regime. We have watched it in the cinema of Alexei German. I know my Russian friends today live utterly normal life. I cannot understand why this almost fictional harshness must be shown to viewers today. Well, it is a postmodernist film, such as that of Michael Haneke or other intelligent Europen filmmakers. This is really a respectable cinema art, but I feel something missing in it, especially when compared it with old Russian films(they are called by Russians as "nashe staroe kino"--"our old cinema"). This simple word expresses ideal relationship between film and film-lover. "Andrei Rublyev" and "My friend, Ivan Lapshin", for example,have been favorite films of many Russian people. They loved these films. But I can not imagine my Russian friends, who are normal and intelligent people, could love "4".Maybe I am not right. Maybe someday "4" may become one of favorite films of Russian people. But if it will happen, surely not in such a way, as with "nashe staroe kino".

I have yet to read a negative professional review of this movie. I guess I must have missed something. The beginning is intriguing, the three main characters meet late at night in an otherwise empty bar and entertain each other with invented stories. That's the best part. After the three go their separate ways, the film splits into three threads. That's when boredom sets in. Certainly, the thread with the Felliniesque babushkas who make dolls out of chewed bread is at first an eye opening curiosity. Unfortunately, the director beat this one to death, even injecting a wild plot line that leads nowhere in particular. Bottom line: a two-hour plot-thin listlessness. If you suffer from insomnia, view it in bed and you will have a good night sleep.

I;m not sure what this movie was. The first half hour is a good talk piece where these three strangers--2 men and a woman-- pull up stools next to each other in a bar and proceed to bull each other, either i think to make the other people think that they're interesting, or just to kid around. Its actually quite a good set piece as it gets going, you;re kind of just a fly on the wall in that bar, just sitting' around watching these three, and just like watching three strangers talk in real life, you learn about the people as the conversation goes on, (learn for instance that they're all actually lying to each other and don't actually do what they say, which is kinda interesting, because as they were talking i was already trying to picture what the rest of the movie was gonna be like based on what they were talking about. note to self--don't do that anymore! you're not in America here!, here in America we like to predict what comes next sir!!!) seriously though watching just the half hour, you might think all right enough talking already, get to the action, but i believe as it goes on, it gets more interesting. Then of course, they all leave, go their separate ways, and then the real story starts, such as it is. you see where the men go after wards, one goes to eat dinner then home to his dad, the other ends up getting arrested for suspicious involvement of his missing neighbor (i think) then it goes to morning, and the movie by and large starts focusing on the woman of the trio.The woman gets a message on her machine that her sister (????) Zoya has died, then there's a great like 5-10 minute scene in which the camera follows her in closeup as she cuts through this barbed wire fence, and walks through all these fields, walking, walking, walking, all keeping her in closeup, then when the camera pulls out, and you see she;s been walking to the burial site of her sister, its a very nice kind of whoa effect--as in did the camera just stop moving, or did she just stop moving? its cool, take my word for it! anyways this leads into a really bizarre set of scenes in which the film then changes its focus onto the woman's elders in her family. you now have the pleasure of seeing a number of semi-gross (actually really gross) scenes of a bunch of toothless old women munching (or should i say gumming) these giant slabs of lamb meat. and drinking o plenty.my favorite recurring scene among these scenes is an old lady who keeps waving her arms and shouting while running from wherever she is to her shack to fill up her cup of vodka or whatever she;s drinking, seriously this happens a couple of times, where the action we were just watching becomes completely interrupted by this old woman running (and the camera keeping her front and center the whole time) screaming, arms waving, stopping to drink, oh that's Ole aunt Agatha, she loves her drink she does. (what???) after she drinks she keeps waking her son up from his sleep demanding that he drink what she just drank, (its time to get up and drink! DAG Nat) this happens a couple of times, enough that i thought the projectionist accidentally looped the same scene twice over, just because i thought it possible! this is in no way relevant to the plot, except maybe to show how old ladies, and in a larger sense, how an old family(???) stays together in Ole Russia. A friend remarked to me that it was similar to watching a National Geographic Special on local customs of old women of a certain tribe in Russia. They may have something there!!!! I did;t even mention the giant replicas (masks) of people made completely out of bread that was the beloved Zoya's specialty, or the grieving boyfriend who growling drunkenly all the way takes all these molds and lays them out in his shed and cries with them, before burring them, and what not. Needless to say, I did't get a lot of the symbolism right off, particularly in the wild bread mask thing, i'm not sure what that was about. but anyways that's about as coherent a summery as i can offer as to what this movie was about. (Oh yeah and in between the scenes of the old women you get snippets of what's happening to the other two men, one gets sent off to prison, and the other is trying to move his dad out his house, eventually these two do intersect again at the end of the movie, but sadly not with each other, but you do get to see them inter-cut with each other at the end, right before the big money end scene which involves yes an old woman singing!) so basically this movie can be split in two--the first part the nice building conversation between the three strangers in the bar, and the weird old ladies of Russia tribal burial saga, and as to what it was all about, i;m not quite sure, that i'll leave up to you fine folks here at the IMDb, but i sure look forward to reading you're submissions, and lastly i;d just like to say, i would actually like to see this movie again at some point, just to be able to say official's and for the record, yep i'm really not sure what i just saw, but i;d sure like to drink with that crazy Ole lady!