Paradise

A brief note at the start of Alexander Abaturov’s Paradise tells us that Russia has something called “control zones”. These are areas that cannot expect a lot of help from the government on the occasion of wildfires. It’s nothing personal. It’s just numbers. If the expenditure outweighs the devastation, then what’s destroyed is not worth saving.

But, of course, that is merely the view from the centre. For the inhabitants of those control zones themselves, fires and blazes are not just figures on a sheet. It will be their responsibility to help themselves when tricky, dangerous situations arise. And such a situation did arise last year in Shologon, a village on the fringes of north-eastern Siberia.

Abaturov shows real-life heroism and his approach is, broadly, poetic. The first words spoken by a voiceover tell of an “unchained wind that never knew borders and blew without ever exhausting its forces”. When the film settles on its first couple of characters, a little girl is trying to memorise the words, “Tell me, Sacred Mountain, do you see the whole Earth from here? Advise me, Secret Mountain, how to reconcile men?” Those words are for a performance, but that is hardly the story being told. This really isn’t a story of people as much as it is a story of groups: one is seen onscreen, the other is entirely off screen.

Those on the screen battle to save their land; the ones offscreen have the privilege of neglect. But one could argue that the main subject isn’t necessarily people as much as it is global warming’s devastation of lands that most people would find difficult to find on a map, lands so remote that their governments can reduce their lives, lands, and livelihoods to cold, unfeeling numbers. Abaturov struggles to show that their remoteness have nothing to do with their humanity. As with more well-known communities, they have children, they have jobs, and when trouble approaches, they have heroes.

It is an admirable impulse to show these people as real. The one quibble with Abaturov’s approach is its focus on community. A few faces recur throughout the film’s 89-minute runtime, but viewers are likely to only note them as groups, not individuals. Do any of them have a name? It’s hard to tell. Besides fighting the fire, do any of them have a purpose? Hard to say. The real-life challenges—in one scene a fire transforms a light-hearted discovery journey ino a fiery, scary one—speak of their values and heroism, and yet it feels incomplete to not have a couple of the heroes give an account of their lives or allow viewers to know them a bit more.

But if that is a let-down, there’s nothing of the sort when it comes to the film’s cinematography. Paradise is chock full of images that one would describe as beautiful if they weren’t so fraught with danger. Paul Guilhaume works his lenses so remarkably that even a scene with ashes in the air and men coughing could belong in a museum. Nonetheless, it is also clear that devastation is nigh. “It eludes us and won’t let itself be caught,” says one of the men tasked with combatting the flames. Not for long, we hope.