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!

Morphia (2008)
Director: Aleksei Balabanov

To sum it up in one sentence: Morphia takes guts to watch in full. The cinematography is superb, but the movie is so brutally and painfully realistic that I felt physically sick a couple of times while watching it, and here is why…

The movie tells the story of a young doctor who becomes addicted to morphine. The script is based on a short story series (The Notes Of A Young Doctor) written by a famous Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov. I was thrilled when I found that out because I’ve read the series a long time ago, and I remember how much impact the book had on me. It was not the gloomy Bulgakov that the world would come to know eventually. The way Bulgakov tells these semi-autobiographical stories is actually quite ‘digestible.’ But, the ending of the story about Dr. Mikhail Polyakov, the center figure in Morphia, blurred out of my mind, so before going to see the movie, I did not really remember the details of what was going to happen. And, boy, was I on a nerve string when I was watching that movie… Following the mind of a drug addict who has people’s lives in his hands can get emotionally exhausting!

Another interesting aspect of the production is that Sergei Bodrov Jr. wrote the adapted script for the movie. Bodrov Jr.’s father is a famous Russian movie director living in the United States. But, Bodrov Jr. has his own claim to fame. He started out acting and became famous for his roles in Brat (Brother) and Brat-2 (Brother-2) also directed by Balabanov, which became iconic for the accurate depiction of the bloody 90’s in Russia. Later, Bodrov Jr. ventured into film directing. Tragically, in 2005, while shooting his movie in the Karmadon Gorge in North Ossetia, Bodrov Jr. and his crew were caught in the rockslide. The search for Bordov Jr. and his crew lasted for days, but turned up nothing. Bodrov Jr. was 31. But, nonetheless, his work lives on, and it is great to see his script being used by such great master as Morphia’s director Aleksei Balabanov.

Balabanov is behind Of Freaks and Men (shot entirely in sepia), Cargo 200 (Gruz 200, on the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan), War (Voina, on Chechen conflict with Russia) and of course Brat with Bodrov Jr. in the leading role. Balabanov’s Morphia stars the top Russian acting talent – the likes of Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Andrei Panin, and Sergei Garmash. Always true to the genre of exceptional realism, Balabanov did not betray his style in Morphia -- this movie will turn your guts out, but you won’t dare walk away!