Limonov: The Bal­lad – first-look review

In Limonov: A Bal­lad, his ram­bunc­tious indict­ment of the Russ­ian poet, provo­ca­teur and polit­i­cal dis­si­dent Eduard Limonov, Russ­ian auteur Kir­ill Sere­bren­nikov unleash­es a with­er­ing, fab­u­list whirl­wind of a char­ac­ter study, one with as much if not more to say about the self-con­tra­dict­ing social con­di­tions of a post-Sovi­et Rus­sia as the deeply trou­bled con­trar­i­an at its centre.

Born in the Sovi­et Union as Eduard Veni­aminovich Savenko, only to lat­er derive his pen name Limonov from limon­ka, the Sovi­et nick­name for an F1 hand grenade, Limonov lived many lives as he careened across Moscow, New York and Paris, only to even­tu­al­ly end up back in Rus­sia. He was known alter­nate­ly as a lit­er­ary tal­ent, a bohemi­an adven­tur­er, a polit­i­cal fire­brand, and a fas­cist street thug; in adapt­ing Emmanuel Carrère’s fic­tion­al biog­ra­phy along­side Ben Hop­kins and Pawel Pow­likows­ki (who’d once intend­ed to direct before decid­ing he didn’t like Limonov enough to base a film around him), Sere­bren­nikov embraces each of these iden­ti­ties as core to the man’s per­plex­ing, self-per­pet­u­at­ed myth.

Con­sid­ered one of Russia’s great mod­ern the­atre direc­tors, and pre­vi­ous­ly the artis­tic direc­tor for the Gogol Cen­ter in Moscow, Sere­bren­nikov seeks not only to depict Limonov’s per­son­al and polit­i­cal evo­lu­tion but also to fol­low his tra­jec­to­ry through a strange, tumul­tuous peri­od in world his­to­ry. In keep­ing with the flair for expres­sive sur­re­al­ism he show­cased in Petrov’s Flu and Tchaikovsky’s Wife, the film­mak­er stages Limonov in an impas­sioned, elab­o­rate fugue, bring­ing togeth­er the his­tor­i­cal record and what’s known about Limonov’s life sto­ry with what the film­mak­er imag­ines as his fraught emo­tion­al and psy­cho­sex­u­al inte­ri­or. In doing so, he locates a com­mon thread in Limonov’s life in his com­pul­sion to rebel: a bright-burn­ing ener­gy that formed the fury of his artis­tic voice and fed into the abid­ing chaos of Russ­ian nation­al­ism that slow­ly cor­rupt­ed and con­sumed him.

A blis­ter­ing inter­ro­ga­tion of the many roles Limonov played in pop­u­lar con­scious­ness, the movie also for­mal­ly mir­rors the character’s seem­ing­ly unstop­pable momen­tum, col­laps­ing time and space through the filmmaker’s sig­na­ture long takes, includ­ing one stand­out sequence in which the poet and his friends are visu­alised mov­ing through the years as they trav­el from room to room, the cul­ture steadi­ly shift­ing around them through recog­nis­able arte­facts and signifiers. 

As por­trayed by Ben Whishaw, in an explo­sive per­for­mance that’s close­ly attuned to the vital­i­ty and vigour of such a char­ac­ter while depict­ing the destruc­tive force of his jeal­ous rage and pet­ty inse­cu­ri­ties, Limonov doesn’t alter­nate between attrac­tive and repul­sive but strad­dles an uneasy eroge­nous zone in the mid­dle. Hilar­i­ous, ter­ri­fy­ing, absurd, pathet­ic, and impetu­ous, Limonov is a par­tic­u­lar­ly volatile lover, and Serebrennikov’s film traces through his rela­tion­ships with first wife Anna (Maria Mashko­va), who’s also engaged in the lit­er­ary scene, then sec­ond wife Ele­na (Vik­to­ria Mirosh­nichenko), a socialite and mod­el, his pre­cip­i­tous descent into emo­tion­al vio­lence and reac­tionary politics.

In Pas­sages, oppo­site Franz Rogows­ki and Adele Exar­chopou­los, Whishaw recent­ly stood out as half of a gay mar­riage that col­laps­es after one part­ner pur­sues a rela­tion­ship with a woman, cap­tur­ing the sen­si­tiv­i­ty and grow­ing self-aware­ness that can accom­pa­ny roman­tic tur­bu­lence. But the actor has nev­er had a role quite as com­plex and con­tra­dic­to­ry as that of Limonov, and he ris­es to the occa­sion with a trans­for­ma­tive lead turn that’s most com­pelling in its depic­tion of how malig­nant nar­cis­sism can sour roman­tic des­per­a­tion into some­thing ugli­er and more grim­ly depress­ing. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing, slow-motion car crash of a per­for­mance: des­tined for destruc­tion, spi­ralling mag­nif­i­cent­ly all the way down.