Com­part­ment No. 6 – first-look review

With an under­cur­rent of tri­umphant sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty unchar­ac­ter­is­tic for a wikipedia page, the entry for shim­mer­ing Euro­dance jam ​“Voy­age, voy­age,” by Desire­less, pro­claims that the song ​“tran­scend­ed the lan­guage bar­ri­er on the music charts and became a huge inter­na­tion­al suc­cess.” The song plays three times in Com­part­ment No. 6, includ­ing over the end­ing cred­its; tru­ly, cheese cross­es all bor­ders. Set most­ly over the course of a mul­ti-day jour­ney on a cramped train from Moscow to Mur­man­sk, the film is a sto­ry of two strangers, a Finnish woman and a Russ­ian man, who are thrown togeth­er, and despite their differences…

The Finnish direc­tor Juho Kuos­ma­n­en has grad­u­at­ed to the Com­pe­ti­tion at Cannes fol­low­ing his 2016 Un Cer­tain Regard win­ner The Hap­pi­est Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, and picks up where the ear­li­er film’s soft-heart­ed end­ing left off. It also rep­re­sents a step for­ward for the direc­tor in terms of his world-build­ing and stag­ing of comedy.

Lau­ra (Sei­da Haar­la) is a stu­dent in Moscow, who was study­ing Russ­ian (which she speaks quite well) but now wants to maybe be archae­ol­o­gist like her social-but­ter­fly girl­friend Iri­na. The two have planned a win­ter jour­ney to Mur­man­sk, north of the Arc­tic Cir­cle, to see the new­ly dis­cov­ered Kanoze­ro Pet­ro­glyphs, but Iri­na can’t come, so Lau­ra rides solo – except for the boor­ish Russ­ian with the oth­er berth in the sleep­er com­part­ment, Ljo­ha (Yuriy Borisov), who is head­ing north to find work at a mine, but has a few days to drink clear alco­hol in the meantime.

The 2021 class has already been a great Cannes Com­pe­ti­tion for female per­form­ers, and Sei­da Haar­la gives a win­ning, intel­li­gent per­for­mance as a nat­u­ral­ly very clever per­son made to feel small and help­less in a strange land. But Yuriy Borisov pops from the first moments you see him: his hunched-shoul­ders pos­ture; his abrupt, agi­tat­ed move­ments and boxer’s duck-and-weave walk; the ani­mal­is­tic way he tears into food, impa­tient­ly and avid­ly. His char­ac­ter as writ­ten is nice­ly cal­i­brat­ed, with the sub­text of deep inse­cu­ri­ty under­neath his boor­ish exte­ri­or, first sub­text and then text, but it’s already all there in his physicality.

Fol­low­ing Olli Máki, with its early-’60s town-and-coun­try clothes and loca­tions, this is anoth­er out-of-the-park smash for Kuosmanen’s cos­tume and pro­duc­tion design teams. The tex­tures of late-’90s Rus­sia, the dying Yeltsin years, are so vivid – the scratchy nylon win­ter parkas and left­over fash­ions – and the train itself is a mar­vel, from the tit­u­lar Com­part­ment 6 to the berths with their thread­bare cur­tains to the wan food in the din­ing car and the ancient lam­i­nate-wood panels.

Ear­ly in the film, Iri­na quotes Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe: ​“Only parts of us will ever touch only parts of oth­ers.” This is fair­ly maudlin and telegraphed, real­ly, for a movie about fleet­ing con­nec­tions and mis­judged first impres­sions, but it’s also an appro­pri­ate table-set­ter for a film that – through both char­ac­ters – explores the prob­lems of self-expres­sion in a for­eign lan­guage or con­text, the way that your lim­it­ed knowl­edge or com­fort or social cap­i­tal in a giv­en milieu shrinks the aper­ture that con­nects you to any­one or any­thing else.

A film called Com­part­ment No. 6 should prob­a­bly end faster than this one does, once its char­ac­ters get off the train, but before it set­tles for being a TIFF audi­ence award run­ner-up, the movie also deliv­ers some insight into trav­el­ing alone as a woman, and the rela­tion­ship between Fin­land and Rus­sia after the col­lapse of the Sovi­et Union.

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