BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL: BEST IN SHOW

I saw Russian director Alexei Popogrebsky’s How I Ended This Summer only near the tail end of the festival, at a screening an expensive cab ride away from the usual venues and with German subtitles. Thankfully, I studied just enough German in school to follow it, but it was a strain. The projection was late at night as well, and I was exhausted. But I smelled an excellent work, in part from a critics’ grid at the back of the daily issue of Screen (where I review) that gave it multiple stars, and in part from the intuition of a programmer (Sarajevo Film Festival). I only recite these boring details because a) I was right in my hunch; and b) I think that we often suppress accurate feelings on account of tiredness, or competing activities, or laziness, so we need to push ourselves to go with them.

The Berlin prizes may have been announced by the time you read this, but there is no question here for any of the trustworthy film journalists that How I Ended My Summer is so far superior to anything in the festival that it deserves the Golden Bear. But juries are juries, and are often comprised of the wrong people to judge the quality of films. This year’s jury president, however, is Werner Herzog, so our hope is that he, as a filmmaker, would appreciate its unique aesthetic and influence the other jurors, with “experts” such as Renee Zellweger.

The film’s plot is simple. Two men work taking readings from their partly radioactive surroundings at an isolated meteorological station in the Arctic, at the far east of Russia, near Alaska. Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis) is in his fifties and has adjusted to this life where 24-hour daylight is the norm, and the only connection to the rest of the world is radio. Pavel (Grigory Dobrygin) is his new partner, a young, eager man who surrounds himself with video games and other technologies foreign to Sergei. One day Sergei goes fishing, and Pavel screws up the daily report, then covers it up. He also gets a tragic message for Sergei that he does not have the strength to convey. Tension builds between the two men.

Simple, in terms of narrative, but an incredibly complex film in which rugged wintry landscape and industrial parts, often abstracted, embedded in the mise-en-scene are the prime movers. Not to mention skillful editing and manipulation of sound. As one critic here put it, it may be a cliché, but nature really is a character in the film.

Sitting in a café in a modern Hilton in the middle of what was East Berlin, the gentle, 37-year-old Popogrebsky explains his working methods. He speaks almost perfectly accented English. I nearly plotzed when he told me he had studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, but dropped out of a post-graduate program. “My dissertation subject was ‘The Meaning of Life,’ but I realized it would have to be the project of a full lifetime,” he says with a grin. He then went on to become a Russian/English interpreter. He never went to film school, never even applied.

I asked him if he worked from a screenplay, because the film, though controlled, is so unconventional in its structure. “I wrote a 30-40 page script, but I don’t do it the American way. Mine reads like a cross between a play and a novella. I took a very detailed script to the polar station. But life and nature were dictating things, so I would rewrite and give the rewrites to the actors daily.” He adds that after visiting the island (Valkarkai) with his d.p. and art director, he had rewritten the original script.

Popogrebsky has a master’s control. I asked him if he were tough to work with (meaning, dictatorial). Sipping green tea, he answered, “No, I’m very nice to work with. You can achieve amazing things with trust and friendship. And I get involved with every aspect of the film. I sat behind my composer for six months.”

Necessarily using a small crew, he shot on digital, and later transferred it to 35mm. For scenes like the one in which Pavel slides down a snow bank, he went through 30 takes (and no stunt doubles). The film’s very last scene is hypnotic, a vista that changes color over several minutes. “That was a five-hour single take,” he says. With some postproduction manipulation, he produced magic.

— Howard Feinstein