The only Russian films that have been selected for Cannes competition since the invasion of Ukraine are Tchaikovsky’s Wife in 2022 and now Limonov: The Ballad, both works by admired stage and film director Kirill Serebrennikov. The director’s history as an LGBT activist and the victim of a politically-motivated fraud trial certainly puts him on the right side of politics. But the new film is a stunner in its own right, not only because its sophisticated visual techniques are stunning to watch, but because the true story of poet Eduard Limonov (1943-2020) and his violent personality, looking for its niche in the world and finding it leading a movement of Nazi skinheads in the post-Gorbachev years of chaos, is conceptually staggering.
Gone is the disappointing staidness of Tchaikovsky’s Wife and its failure to deal with Antonina Miliukova’s mental problems in a progressive way. Here, the theme song (often played) is Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, an urge that strikes a strong chord in the nerdy, single-minded, unhinged psychopath Eddie. Played with edgy hauteur by British Shakespearean actor Ben Whishaw, whose other roles have ranged from James Bond’s Q to Paddington Bear, Limonov is an extraordinary chance to walk the razor’s edge between tenuous control and flamboyantly losing it.
The only problem with Whishaw’s intense, often amusing performance is that the Italian and French producers, and possibly the director himself, have chosen to shoot the entire film in English, which in a story of this weight feels particularly wrong. The anomaly is somewhat masked when Eddie and his girlfriend go into exile in the lower depths of New York, but the stilted English dialogue exchanged at a gathering of intellectual Muscovites is very disconcerting. If the film has a major flaw, the language issue is it.
Ignoring that (and it isn’t easy), the film has a great deal to offer. The screenplay was written by Serebrennikov along with Academy Award-winning Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski (Cold War) and Ben Hopkins and is based on a 2011 biographical novel by French writer Emmanuel Carrère. It goes deep into dissecting not just the protag’s warped psyche, but paints a moving picture of the Russian intelligentsia trapped in a repressive society. Cultural figures like Solzhenitsyn, Sakarov, Brodsky and Yevtushenko are frequently cited, and the last-mentioned poet actually appears in a New York scene, ironic and self-dismissive, where he accurately predicts Eddie’s future literary fame, imprisonment and triumph as a political leader. (At the time, Limonov was working as a butler and servant to a rich man.)
In another scene Eddie, now the celebrated author of 17 books, visits his aged parents in Soviet Ukraine, where he grew up. His father, who worked for State Security, is convinced that Gorbachev is going to ruin the country and furious over the fake news he reads in the newspaper, which he believes blindly.
Dates are very important in the film, which jumps around chronologically with free-wheeling abandon. It opens on a flashforward to Moscow in 1989 where Eddie is giving a rowdy, uncouth press conference, his off-the-wall right-wing politics already controversial but drawing the crowds. His working life begins in a steel factory, but he quits to dedicate himself to writing poetry. Frequenting intellectual circles despite the small regard he is afforded, Eddie sees and wants the fashionable beauty Elena (a perfect pitch performance from Viktoria Miroshnichenko), even though she’s “out of his league”. Not long after that he concocts a stratagem for getting her away from her boyfriend: he slits his wrist and paints her name on the walls with his blood. It works, because Elena is as crazy as he is, and they are expelled from the USSR together. Welcome to New York.
Living on his welfare check of $238, they turn their claustrophobic apartment into a love nest where the main attraction is sex. Eddie, who now dresses in white with Mick Jagger sunglasses and haircut, brings in a photographer to take pictures of Elena naked, and then posing in S&M gear with two naked men. The soundtrack is still Lou Reed, but when Elena sees her chance she leaves the abusive moron and moves on to a modeling career, while Eddie sinks into a new Boy George persona to the tune of the Sex Pistols. One of the key scenes is a night he spends on the roof of a building losing his virginity to a Black homeless man, in which his emotional vulnerabilities are exposed. Half-delirious, he rants on about America’s treatment of its poor, and the need for a violent revolution to shatter capitalist consumerism in an apocalypse. Rather fittingly, he just passes for another looney in downtown Manhattan and is ignored.
The Russian crew, led by D.P. Roman Vasyanov, does an outstanding job creating an ever-changing atmosphere around the anti-hero. A variety of film and video techniques capture the action in what sometimes seems like a mockumentary look; at other times the film is closer to a sickening blend of comedy and violence, like a barista who deliberately mixes two non-complementary ingredients into someone’s drink to see what will happen. The final scenes reveal the outcome.
Director: Kirill Serebrennikov
Screenplay: Pawel Pawlikowski, Kirill Serebrennikov, Ben Hopkins based on a novel by Emmanuel Carrère
Cast: Ben Whishaw, Viktoria Miroshnichenko, Masha Mashkova
Producers: Lorenzo Gangarossa, Mario Gianani, Dimitri Rassam, Ilya Stewart
Cinematography: Roman Vasyanov
Editing: Yuriy Karikh
Production design: Lyubov Korolkova, Vladislav Ogay
Costume design: Timofey Gostev, Ekaterina Rubleva
Music: Massimo Pupillo
Sound: Boris Voyt
Production companies: Wildside (Italy), Fremantle (Spain)
World Sales: Vision Distribution
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In English, Russian
138 minutes
