Tale in the Darkness by Nikolay Khomeriki

In Tale in the Darkness, even the dolphins in the zoo are sad. Grey faces in grey uniforms wander through grey Russian streets, in search of love, or at least some kind of communication. Angelina is a police officer rescuing children from fucked-up families. At the police station, the walls breathe the despair of a dysfunctional society in which many need saving.

Khomeriki won his first Cannes award in 2005 with the short VDOYOM. His first feature, 977, made it to Un Certain Regard in 2006. 977 was a mystical drama about a scientific experiment trying to calculate the mathematical laws of human emotions. With Tale in the Darkness, Khomeriki stays in the backyard of human relationships, but digs even deeper. The darkness is really dark: it’s beyond dark.

Alisa Khazanova, who also starred in 977, elegantly portrays the unsmiling hero Angelina. She brings a toothless boy to play and tells him he’s a little prince. “And you’re an old fucking dry cunt”, he replies, pretty much summing up the film’s dialogue as well as revealing what kind of environment he grew up in. Khomeriki’s social criticism is subtle, more of a framework than a main theme. Instead, this is an original love story, only without that much love.

The dry cunt comment shocks Angelina into slowly changing her life, and herself. She takes tango lessons, loosens her topknot, and undoes the first button of her uniform. The camera always follows her with the same slow pace, sometimes from a distance, sometimes from behind. The scenes are long, the colours are bleak, and the sun never shines. But in all of the sadness, the images are a true joy, and thus the slow scenes where nothing happens are never dull.

Angelina waits, Angelina washes clothes, Angelina has sex, always with the same look on her face - serious, empty. As Lev Kuleshov did with the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin in his montage experiments in the 1920s, Khomeriki uses actress Alisa Khazanova’s expressionless visage as an empty painting, filling it with substance and emotions. But instead of alternating images of a blank face with soup, or a dead woman, like Kuleshov, Khomeriki uses the cold love and harsh dialogue between Angelina and her police partner Dimych to complete his work of art. And it works.

Moa Geistrand