Travelling with Pets
The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Envisioning Russia” series celebrates 100 years of Russian cinema. The selection ranges from the early and iconic agitprop of Eisenstein and Kuleshov to the metaphysical long takes of Tarkovsky, to innovative new films that embody the aesthetically and generically diverse styles of Russian cinema today.
Grand Prize winner of the Moscow International Film Festival, Travelling with Pets is a meditative wisp of a film punctuated by moments of intense joy and local color. The film follows Natalya (Kseniya Kutepova), a woman who has led a tedious and austere life since being sold into marriage at 16 to a coarse railroad worker. After her husband dies unexpectedly delivering fresh milk to a passing train, Natalya must begin to imagine a new life for herself as a free and desirable woman.
When Natalya burns her husband’s clothes and replaces his portrait with a painting of a female patron saint, she shrugs off the expectations and the constraints that have been imposed on her and perhaps all women. Living in her dilapidated house near the railroad, Natalya embarks on a childlike journey of self-exploration, indulging every whim, taking on a highly-sexed truck driver Sergei (Dmitri Dyuzhev) as a lover, surrounding herself with pets, flirting with spirituality and testing her powers of seduction.
Director Vera Storozheva crafts a lyrical tale where the stark landscape, still waters and intermittent rumblings of approaching trains emerge as an extension of the protagonist’s mentality and endless possibilities for movement and transformation. Without the inclusion of a flat-screen television and a few pop-culture references, the bleak rural Russia portrayed in Travelling with Pets feels pre-modern at times, a disconcerting statement about the selective success of the country’s economic liberalization.
Lead actress Kutepova is brilliant as Natalya in a subdued and nuanced performance. She is at once steely and vulnerable, resolved and terribly unsure. Natalya’s laconic, inscrutable personality is a refreshing alternative to the glut of neurotic female protagonists, which verbalize (and agonize over) every thought and motivation. Her silences are filled out beautifully by a lilting and spare piano score.
Travelling with Pets is finally an elegy to freedom and desire with all the uncertainties and joys they offer. Natalya goes after what she wants with an open heart and ultimately refuses to compromise who she is for security, tradition or sentiment.
© 2008 Robyn Citizen. All rights reserved.
Leave a Response
You must be logged in to post a comment.
