Review of Russian Ark (2002) by Phil G — 30 Dec 2003

I bought this for my mom for Christmas, and I watched it for the first time on Sunday. In case you haven't heard of this movie, the big thing about it is that it was filmed entirely in one shot. There are no cuts in the movie. Not one. The sequences we've watched in Film that go for a minute or two without cuts (or the one I commented on in my review of [I]The Royal Tenenbaums[/I]) are nothing compared to this movie, which is one unbroken 90-minute shot. At first this was a little unnerving (Ferges is right, you really do expect cuts fairly often), but after a while, I slipped into the rhythm of the film... and almost fell asleep. The steady smooth camera movement is so sleep inducing... Anyway.

The film itself is a walk through the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The museum is a huge, beautiful building that used to be a palace for the czars, so you really can walk around it for 90 minutes and never go down the same hallway or through the same room twice. The camera takes the first-person perspective of an unseen narrator. There's also an annoying old French guy who spends most of the movie walking some distance in front of the camera arguing with the narrator about Russia. Not much really happens in the movie (actually, there's no plot whatsoever), the camera just moves through different periods of Russian history and you see both the museum as it is now and what it would have looked like as a palace at various times in history. This is a cool idea, but it leads to encounters with various random people that are just confusing. Even my Russia-obsessed parents didn't know who some of these people were.

I confess to being thoroughly bored for about the entire second half of the movie. It didn't really do anything to grab hold of my attention, once the novelty of the camera technique had worn off. Maybe that makes me shallow, or maybe I just wasn't in the right mood when I was watching it. Even though I didn't really enjoy it, it represents a truly amazing accomplishment. Since there are no cuts, one mistake at the end of the film meant starting over from the beginning, no small task since the film involved thousands of extras and extremely complicated unseen scene changes. So I gave [I]Russian Ark[/I] a 6/10- not among my favorite films, but definitely not bad in any way and an extremely impressive achievement.