Kursk – first look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Kursk – first look review

08 Sep 2018

Words by Elena Lazic

Couple in military uniform and formal dress smiling and raising a glass at a formal event.
Couple in military uniform and formal dress smiling and raising a glass at a formal event.
Direc­tor Thomas Vin­ter­berg and a for­mi­da­ble cast recre­ate the final hours of a real-life nuclear submarine.

Thomas Vinterberg’s lat­est film tells the true, trag­ic sto­ry of how the neglect, incom­pe­tence, greed, and pride of Russ­ian Navy offi­cials led to the deaths of dozens of men on the Kursk, a nuclear sub­ma­rine once deemed unsinkable.

Because actu­al peo­ple died in the events that they depict, films about real-life tragedies often strive to pay trib­ute to the vic­tims. To tell their sto­ry truth­ful­ly and to immor­talise it on screen is already one way of doing so, but even the best inten­tions are mud­dled when the dead are not sim­ply por­trayed as inno­cent vic­tims, but as saints and mar­tyrs. The urge to empha­sise the good­ness in the dead is under­stand­able, but it often gross­ly implies that cer­tain lives have more val­ue than others.

Vin­ter­berg lays into this uncom­fort­able impulse with­out restraint, often to tire­some effect. The film opens with a series of sequences show­cas­ing the unusu­al gen­eros­i­ty of Matthias Schoe­naerts’ Mikhail Kalekov, his idyl­lic home life with his preg­nant wife (Léa Sey­doux in a thank­less role) and son, and the cama­raderie between him and the men of his crew. When one of them strug­gles to pay for his wed­ding par­ty, all his friends spon­ta­neous­ly pawn their watch­es: they know that he would do the same for them.

These are all pos­i­tive and love­ly scene to wit­ness, but none of them seem gen­uine – the sen­ti­ments shown rather than felt. Vin­ter­berg appears to be aim­ing for pres­tige dra­ma but does not pull it off. The dia­logue is large­ly to blame, but it isn’t helped by the mad­den­ing cast­ing choic­es: to have all the char­ac­ters com­mu­ni­cate in Eng­lish makes some kind of sense, but it does not explain why almost every actor plays a char­ac­ter of a dif­fer­ent nation­al­i­ty than their own. The most baf­fling exam­ple is the cast­ing of Peter Simonis­chek (the tit­u­lar Toni Erd­mann) as a Russ­ian Navy official.

To make things worse, the sto­ry is stripped of the polit­i­cal res­o­nance and impli­ca­tions that the events did car­ry at the time. There are a few vague ref­er­ences to old Russ­ian ships and lack of funds, but Vladimir Putin – who had just began his pres­i­den­cy when the inci­dent occurred – is con­spic­u­ous­ly absent. This sim­pli­fi­ca­tion deprives the audi­ence of ways to con­nect with the film, but it also makes the tragedy appear episod­ic and ran­dom, as opposed to a mean­ing­ful moment in post Cold War relations.

Vin­ter­berg seems to care more about the visu­al look of the film than he does about the sto­ry itself. The unde­ni­ably beau­ti­ful cin­e­matog­ra­phy and care­ful­ly realised sets only empha­sise the glib­ness of script. But on a more fun­da­men­tal lev­el, this choice of aes­thet­ic vio­lent­ly jars with the film’s oth­er ambi­tions – along with a dra­mat­ic retelling of the bureau­crat­ic nego­ti­a­tions on land between Russ­ian and British author­i­ties, Kursk also strives to offer a vis­cer­al account of the men’s suf­fer­ing in the submarine.

The film’s shift from a nar­row aspect ratio to a much wider one when the sub­ma­rine gets to sea does put a more real­ist slant on pro­ceed­ings. But the clunky dia­logue, clichéd rela­tion­ships and char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of every char­ac­ter under­mine all these efforts. Even as we wit­ness the extreme con­di­tions these men were put under – risk of explo­sion, freez­ing tem­per­a­tures and a lack of oxy­gen – Kursk ulti­mate­ly leaves us cold.

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