The “dead friend” in Russian filmmaker Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s directorial debut alludes to her partner, Kimi Morev, who killed himself in 2016 after a lifelong battle with drugs and depression – a struggle wrought heart-wrenchingly large on screen. But it’s obvious what has happened in the pair’s personal sphere also serves as an analogy of what’s unfolding in the Russian public sphere. Comprising self-filmed footage across eleven years, How to Save A Dead Friend could very well be Syroechkovskaya’s ode to her own generation and to her own country as a whole, as Russia – and we now know very well how – sinks ever more quickly into tyranny. As she says at one point in a voiceover, “Can anyone be in control of anything besides the syringe and self-destruction?”
Indeed, this is the one film Vladimir Putin and his cronies would never want anyone to see. Through Syroechkvoskaya’s material, in which video recordings about the couple’s own life are punctuated by selected images of a country in perennial crisis – a mix of Putin’s Big Brother-like televised addresses and horrifying sequences of state-sanctioned violence against dissent. Coming from the inside, and from a generation Putin is seeking to silence and then refashion to his imperialist image, How to Save A Dead Friend – which premiered at the Visions du Réel festival in April before unspooling at the independent ACID programme at Cannes – is essential viewing for those seeking an intimate understanding of Russian society from within.
When the documentary begins, Morev is already dead: we see Syroechkovskaya attending his funeral on a cold, grey and snowy day. What follows is a chronological recollection of the young couple’s life in what the filmmaker, with her typical sense of morbid humor, dubbed the “Depression Federation”, a play on Russia’s official name of Russian Federation). In 2005, the 16-year-old Syroechkovskaya is an angst-fuelled adolescent with a worldview so bleak that she was thinking of killing herself before the year ends. And then she meets Morev, a history major whose pallid and gaunt appearance belies a brilliant mind – which makes it even more heart-breaking to see him wasting away, year by year, as he succumbs to his personal demons.
Then again, the journey is harrowing all round, and Syroechkovskaya manages to convey the ever-downward changes in mood through knowing visual and musical tropes. In happier days at the beginning of the relationship, we catch a glimpse of their everyday lives – their marriage, their rows about who’s doing the dishes and so on – through cutesy montages of photos and gaudy typography. As it’s evident that there’s not going to be a “happily ever after” – and Syroechkovskaya does warn, in her voiceover, that those who want that “should stop watching now” – things get greyer, grittier and grainier, as the menacing shadows of adulthood and authoritarianism close in.
In the darkness, however, there are sparkles of light: in contrast to Morev’s doomed struggle with himself, Syroechkovskaya’s own growth as an artist and also as a social activist offers a glimpse of what possibilities – however transitory they might seem – there could be for those who persist and plow on regardless. At the beginning of the film, we see Russian apartment buildings as gloomy blocks of concrete, symbolic of the drab realities in which they exist; in the end, with the help of a brilliant round of digital mirroring effects, they become skyborne towers floating somewhere, where perhaps some kind of salvation might be at hand. How to Save A Dead Friend might mostly be about the oppression imposed on Russian mortal coils, but the documentary – in terms of its storytelling and also its style – offers proof of the existence of dynamism and hope at the most desperate of times.
Director-screenwriter: Marusya Syroechkovskaya
Producers: Ksenia Gapchenko, Mario Adamson
Cinematography: Marusya Syroechkovskaya, Kimi Morev
Editor: Qutaiba Barhamji
Music: Felix Mikensky
Sound design: Yngve Leidulv Saetre, Thomas Angell Endresen
Production companies: Sisyfos Film Production, Docs Vostok
World sales: Lightdox
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (ACID)
In Russian
103 minutes
