Another tale from the Arctic circle, Compartment Number 6 is a railroad road movie which follows the Finnish protagonist, Laura, from Moscow to Murmansk. Laura finds herself in a sleeper carriage with Ljoha, a drunken Mayakovsky lookalike. Initially intimidated by him, their trip then turns into an odd couple romance. The film opens with a literary party in Moscow, where people quote Pelevin, and in this moment one wonders whether Compartment Number 6 might offer an insight into that other Russia, the one that seems to have been kicked into the long grass, both by Putin and his henchmen and the rest of the world. Pelevin’s Russia is full of strangeness and a warped literary cynicism which goes back to Gogol, Bulgakov and their ilk. But after suggesting it might investigate these offbeat roots, the film doesn’t really go there, no matter how much Yuriy Borisov, as Ljoha tries. His erratic but doleful performance lends the film a slightly more left field outlook, but this is really Laura’s story. Not all that dissimilar from this year’s breakout European film, Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, Compartment Number 6 is another film by a man which is a study in a woman achieving some kind of altered consciousness through an unexpected love affair that doesn’t work out as it might have done. This zeitgeisty theme is well framed by the train journey and the Maguffin of Laura’s quest to find the Murmansk petroglyphs, but the film’s ultimate destination feels seems more prosaic than the spectacular scenery it presents.
Mr Curry, more generously, suspected that the issues we shared with the film might have been down to the source material novel from which the film has been adapted.
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