Vancouver International Film Festival 2009 – Russian flicks Morphia and A Room And A Half – REVIEW AND PHOTO REPORT! PART II
A Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to the Homeland (2008)
Director: Andrey Khrzhanovsky
I was watching A Room and A Half the day after watching Morphia – and, it was quite a dramatic change from one movie to another. After the gloom and doom of Morphia, A Room and A Half felt like a breeze – fun, electric, humane, and sometimes really awkward.
The movie is a fantasy, radically different from the hyper-realistic Morphia. It centers on the return of a famous Russian poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky from exile in the United States back to Russia, except Brodsky never actually returned to Russia. But, the movie director Khrzhanovsky asks, “what if…?” Brodsky was a political outcast, a prophet whom the Soviet government tried to belittle and ridicule to the point that he decided to leave the country.
A couple of Brodsky’s quotes mentioned in the movie really got me to think deep: at one point, he says, “mass culture does not exist; an artist is ‘one and only’ by definition.” I felt that this pillar upon which Brodsky’s life work stood is not just a relic of the Soviet era, but could not be more pertinent here in North America nowadays. The balloon boy story underscored people’s desire for mass entertainment, mass attention, and mass coverage. But, does that desire annihilate that ‘one and only’ artist that Brodsky is talking about?
In any case, this movie is not really about politics. It is about the torment of a man separated from his hometown and family by the exile. Brodksy’s nostalgia and longing to see his parents beautifully portrayed by Alisa Freinlich and Sergei Yursky is really what the movie is all about.
The movie director has a background in animation and it showed! Occasional interjections of cartoons did a good job of emphasizing the absurdity of the plot.
The only problem I found with this movie was its length. Unlike during Morphia’s screening where everybody was glued to their seats, during the screening of A Room and a Half, I saw people leave hours before the movie was over. To me, some of the scenes were unnecessarily long. Other that, I give this movie a definite pass!
