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Статьи. Критика.
"A Friend of the Deceased"
Dying too slowly
There is a stereotype that surrounds foreign films, one that tells the public they are boring, slow-moving and too "artsy" for their own good. "A Friend of the Deceased" does nothing to dispel that stereotype and, in fact, contributes to it.
It is completely devoid of anything that could even hope to capture an audience's attention, much less hold it for one excruciating hour and 45 minutes.
This Russian film tells the story of Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev), an intellectual who struggles to find work and contentment in his country's post-Soviet era. When his wife leaves him for a co-worker, he hires an assassin to kill him, then changes his mind. The script by Andrei Kourkov pushes the plot uncomfortably toward a very predictable anti-climax -- and drags mercilessly in between. Reflective moments have no significance and dialogue is trite. Worse, the film revels in its own moodiness, as though its subject matter and approach to the material justify the ineffectual technique.
The acting for the most part is spirited, but the characters are very poorly sketched. Lazarev breathes an impressive amount of life into his character and seems quite comfortable carrying the film. He draws out Anatoli's conflicts and emotions with aplomb and takes it upon himself to use his acting to affect every aspect of the production in a meaningful way.
Another good performance is delivered by Tatiana Krivitska, who plays a dispirited prostitute floating in and out of Anatoli's life. Her character is by far the most interesting, and she gives a spirited performance.
The directing is cautious and deliberate, but painfully so -- Vyacheslav Krishtofovich overuses techniques like repetition and metaphor to the point that they choke any remaining life out of the film. He makes the mistake of trying to substitute angst for genuine emotion, and it just doesn't work.
Dozens of movies setting tormented intellectuals against superficial capitalist societies have been released in recent years -- and most of them are much better than this one. Moviegoers should attend at their own risk -- and beware of severe boredom.
By Jeff Vice
Deseret News movie critic
Every character but one in "A Friend of the Deceased" is interesting enough to be the center of a movie. So guess which one winds up being the major focus of the film?
This Ukrainian-made thriller, which was shown at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, suffers from having a lead character who's far too remote and aloof to sympathize with, as well as the filmmaker's dreadful miscalculation in overall tone.
"A Friend of the Deceased" would have been a pretty good dark comedy, but as directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich (1991's "Adam's Rib"), it's hard to figure out whether things are supposed to be ironic or if they're supposed to be dramatic.
What makes it so irritating is that the idea behind the film is so interesting. (It would be pretty original, too, if not for the similarly uneven comedy "Bulworth," which sports a similar plot.)
Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev), an unemployed intellectual, is distraught that his wife, Katia (Angelika Nevolina), is leaving him for another man. So with the help of his shady friend Dima (Eugen Pachin), the suicidal but cowardly man hires a killer to do the dirty deed for him.
Complications arise when Anatoli meets Vika (Tatiana Krivitska), a young prostitute who takes an instant liking to him.
Suddenly reinvigorated, Anatoli unsuccessfully tries to call off the "hit," and is forced to hire a second man (Sergiy Romanyuk) to protect him — with lethal force, if necessary.
Things get even more ironic from there, with an ending that's supposed to take the story full circle. But Lazarev's placid performance is off-putting and Krishtofovich doesn't give us enough of a reason to care about the character.
To their credit, the other cast members are quite appealing, especially Krivitska and Elena Korikova, who plays the wife of the first hitman. Unfortunately, they're both relegated to supporting roles.
"A Friend of the Deceased" is rated R for profanity, female nudity and violent slapping and fist fighting, as well as use of ethnic
slurs.
A Friend of the Deceased by Ukrainian director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich marks the end of a six-year hiatus since his acclaimed Adam's Rib received kudos at Cannes. Unfortunately, Krishtofovich's choice of material doesn't show much reflection during that dry spell which mirrors economic and spiritual upheaval in the Ukraine. While registering much of the disaffection that supposedly looms in the former Soviet Union, Krishtofovich has crafted his own impassive spell of cinematic glasnost.
Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev) is an intellectual with academic credentials that have become obsolete in a changing world. He cannot find work and, to add to his humiliation, must use his English literature training to tutor the emerging business elites. His calamitous situation is only worsened by the discovery that his wife Katia (Angelika Nevolina) is leaving him for another man.
His good friend Dima (Eugen Pachin) has the answer to this dilemma: Hire one of Kiev's numerous contract killers and have the slattern rubbed out. The depressed Anatoli doesn't even take to this idea, though. Instead, he decides to use the hit man to have himself done in, and arranges for the job to happen in one of his favorite little cafes.
When Anatoli goes to the agreed-upon place and is kicked out on its early closure for a birthday party, his plight moves from the tragic to the ridiculous. A series of twists affect his disturbed state, including meeting Vika (Tatiana Krivitska), a spry young hooker, and soon his resuscitated view of life jars against the arrangements of the film's first third.
Krishtofovich, working from a screenplay by satirist Andreï Kourkov, concocts a brooding work that, at its best moments, resembles Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, but lacks that classic's fundamental, driving tensions. Long on ideology and short on solid dramatization, A Friend of the Deceased feels almost
postmortem.
A Friend of the Deceased
'Friend of the Deceased' is full of comic irony
By KEVIN THOMAS © Los Angeles Times
Reviewed June 26, 1998
C-J Rating:
MPAA Rating: R; violence, nudity. (1 hr., 40 min.)
This Ukrainian film deals with a 35-year-old intellectual, played by Alexandre Lazarev, who has difficulty dealing with the economic and social changes that occur when the Soviet Union breaks up. When his wife leaves him, he puts out a contract on his life, then tries to call off the killing. Tatiana Krivitska co-stars.
With the elegant and tantalizing "A Friend of the Deceased," director Viatcheslav Krichtofovitch and writer Andrei Kourkov take an old plot -- hiring someone to kill you, only to change your mind -- and use it to reveal the desperation and corruption that grips post-Soviet Ukraine, reducing the value of human life itself.
Yet when a man remarks that friendship, now replaced with purely business relationships, is part of "the glorious Soviet past," this reference to the former U.S.S.R. is expressed with bitter irony. "A Friend of the Deceased" is not nostalgic for Communist Party rule but rather for the warmth between human beings that is in danger of evaporating in a Darwinian struggle to survive in the new market economy.
You would think that Alexandre Lazarev's Anatoli, a former academic fluent in English and French, would have plenty of opportunities to prosper in the new world of capitalist expansion. That the reverse is the case leaves us to suspect that men and women like Anatoli must be a dime a dozen in the former Soviet nations.
In any event, Anatoli slips into such drunken despair in trying to survive as a translator (mainly for crass new entrepreneurs) that he succumbs to a friend's urging that he hire a hit man to rub out the more prosperous man to whom Anatoli has lost his ambitious wife.
He's not serious about having his rival executed but instead decides to shift the hit man's target to himself. After a rendezvous with a contract killer aborts when their meeting place, a cafe, closes early, Anatoli is surprised to realize that he's glad to have a new lease on life, only to discover that his execution is set in motion and it that it's too late to reverse it.
"A Friend of the Deceased," which was selected for Cannes' prestigious Directors Fortnight last year, is an anti-thriller in the sense that its makers transform its inherent suspense elements into an evocation of the paranoia that permeates Ukrainian society. Anatoli emerges as an engaging man, adrift in a world he may not be strong enough either to negotiate or to resist succumbing to its corruptions. The film's other characters are similarly well-drawn.
Visually, "A Friend" is a jewel, with cinematographer Vilen Kolouta capturing three distinct areas of Kiev -- the charming cobblestoned old city where Anatoli lives in a flat of faded elegance, the sleek night-life district and a suburban high-rise community under construction, at once impersonal and luxurious -- that are virtually interchangeable with such developments the world over. Krichtofovitch fulfills his stated intention beautifully, which is to show "the inability of an intelligent, refined, cultured but weak man to find his place in the new society. ... We can't ask people to behave like
heroes."
QUICK TAKE:
Drama: A man tries to stop the contract killer whom he's hired to kill himself and must face the repercussions of both acts.
PLOT:
Anatoli (ALEXANDRE LAZAREV) is a nearly out of work foreign translator in the city of Kiev. After the fall of communism, there's been little work for Anatoli and to make matters worse for him, he's discovered that his wife, Katia (ANGELIKA NEVOLINA) is having an affair. Accidentally running into Dima (EUGEN PACHIN), an old friend he hasn't seen for years, Anatoli learns that Dima has connections with a hitman if he wants his wife's lover rubbed out. Instead of targeting that man, however, Anatoli puts a contract out on himself with Kostia (CONSTANTIN KOSTYCHIN), a contract killer who's never met Anatoli, but now has a picture of him.
When forces beyond his control temporarily delay the hit, Anatoli celebrates his reprieve by getting drunk and taking home Lena (TATIANA KRIVITSKA), a local prostitute. Feeding off her positive and bubbly attitude, Anatoli suddenly feels alive again and wants the hit called off, but Dima tells him that it's too late. Fearing for his life, Anatoli hires Ivan (SERGIY ROMANYUK), another contract killer, to take out Kostia, but neither knows what that man even looks like. Awaiting the first killer's next move, Anatoli must deal with the consequences of hiring both hitmen.
WILL KIDS WANT TO SEE IT?
It's highly unlikely that this bleak, Russian film will draw in many kids.
WHY THE MPAA RATED IT: R
For some nudity and language.
CAST AS ROLE MODELS:
ALEXANDRE LAZAREV plays a distraught man who put out a contract on his own life. Deciding he wants to live, he then puts out a contract on the first hitman. Along the way he drinks quite a bit and uses the services of a prostitute.
TATIANA KRIVITSKA plays a bubbly prostitute who befriends Anatoli.
SERGIY ROMANYUK plays a hitman hired by Anatoli to kill several people.
OUR TAKE: 5 out of 10
A rather bleak look at life in the former Soviet Union after the fall of communism, "A Friend of the Deceased" sounds like a comedy on paper, but comes off as anything but in reality. Although there are tiny bits of ironic humor interspersed throughout the production, none elicit any laughs and at best the humor should be called charred instead of black.
Director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich ("Adam's Rib"), working from a screenplay by Andrei Kourkov, has definitely set out to show how things have changed since "freedom" swept through his nation. Although the citizens don't have to worry about the government anymore, their newfound capitalistic society has forced the former repression-induced friendships into nothing more than anonymous business relationships. As one character states, "Friendships disappeared with our glorious Soviet past."
The main character, with his skills no longer in need as they once were, has no real friends. Everyone, including his old buddy Dima, his estranged wife, and the prostitute he sees are nothing more than mere acquaintances. Krishtofovich also takes that notion a step further with Kostia, the first hitman, a person Anatoli doesn't even know who's about to have a big impact on his life.
In fact, the sequence where Anatoli and Ivan, his second hired hitman, wait for the first is probably the best in the film. Reminding one of Hitchcock's shooting and storytelling style, the two men anxiously await the arrival of that unknown and unrecognizable hitman. The fact that he could be anyone gives the film a "fun" nervousness and pumps the sequence full of energy that's so desperately needed throughout the rest of the production, but doesn't exist.
Even so, the filmmakers could have taken that scene even further by having Anatoli and Ivan believing that they "took out" the correct guy, only to find out later that the original hitman is still on the loose. Not only would that have generated more suspense (and therefore more life into the film), but it would have further emphasized the story's notion that relationships with others have broken down so far that no one really knows who anyone is anymore.
Additionally, one's never quite sure how to take the film. It has the underpinnings of a wild, black satire, where things continuously go wrong for the main character — even his own self-hired assassination gets called off when his favorite coffee shop unexpectedly closes early — but most of that's smothered by the rest of the film's somber moments. Personally, and if compelled to include those satirical elements, I would have taken the film down more of a comedic road to put a decidedly witty spin on the proceedings.
Yet Krishtofovich and company seem more intent on showing the morose qualities of life in Kiev, and on that level they certainly succeed. Nearly no one, except for Lena the prostitute, is happy and most everyone carries a sullen aura about them. In portraying the stuporous main character, Alexandre Lazarev is quite effective, and he certainly draws the audience's sympathy to his plight. After all, nearly everyone has gone through a stage in their life where they felt that they didn't truly and deeply know anyone, but even so, his character's gloomy predisposition is hard to swallow in such large doses.
In keeping with the anonymous quality of Anatoli's relationships, we never know much about the people surrounding him, but the performers inhabiting those characters all do a decent job. Angelika Nevolina is good in her brief bits as the adulterous wife whose shame and/or pity when she sees Anatoli continually prods her to ask if he needs money to get by, and film newcomer Tatiana Krivitska brings the film its much needed, but brief life as the bubbly prostitute.
Most effective, however, is Sergiy Romanyuk as the second hired contract killer who benefits from his anonymous and mysterious qualities. Instead of playing him like the stereotypically ruthless assassin, Romanyuk brings a certain troubled, but still confidant nature to his character, all of which makes him that much more compelling.
It's too bad that can't be said about the rest of the film. While it's a decent production, the plot description sounded so much better in the production notes than what's finally delivered on screen. Perhaps that's because it appeared to have more of a comic slant, but the film's intentional sullen atmosphere essentially keeps it from ever really taking off.
Perhaps if Krishtofovich had firmly taken the film in either direction, the results would be more satisfying. As delivered, the film has a continuously awkward feel about it, as if the comedy's always trying to break out, but can't under the gravity of the melancholy circumstances. Thus, we give "A Friend of the Deceased" a 5 out of 10.
OUR WORD TO PARENTS:
Although it's doubtful many kids will want to see this film, here's quick look at its content. We see a prostitute's bare breasts in several scenes (along with most of her bare butt) and there's some implied, but not seen sexual activity. Profanity is limited but does include two uses of the "f" word, and then there's the whole concept of hiring hitmen to kill others or oneself. Related to that, one man is killed, but the violent act occurs off camera.
Beyond the main character drinking quite a bit and the bevy of bad attitudes (the hitmen, people hiring hitmen, people having affairs, etc...), the rest of the film doesn't have too much in the order of major objectionable material. Even so, you may want to take a look through it should you or someone in your home wish to see this film.
Pretty pictures of dark despair in modern Ukraine
By BOB THOMPSON
Toronto Sun
If Ukrainian movie director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich ever needed a sideline, he could get into making Eastern European TV commercials.
Nobody west of Paris pitches with pretty pictures better than Krishtofovich.
His latest sell in Russian with English subtitles is A Friend Of The Deceased, a splendid promotion of a disintegrating social contract.
Playing the product placement for social despair is Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev), a multi-lingual loser from Kiev who sits by his perfectly-shaded apartment window and gives us the downtrodden stare.
Kiev, you see, is for sale, in these post-Soviet times where the mob rules and friendships are all about deals for a few American dollars more.
To underscore this post-revolution result, Anatoli's wife leaves him for her advertising company boss. This revolting development reduces Anatoli to a handsome hunk of well-framed zombieness.
So what's this essential being supposed to do? Sit around his window looking lovely? No way.
Secretly, Anatoli hires a hit man to kill him, but then changes his high-IQ mind after figuratively signing his death warrant.
This is not an original idea in the movie game -- foreign or domestic. But Krishtofovich's intentions are all about presentation and less about story.
As Anatoli's survival instincts kick in, the director does offer a few narrative twists and turns, so as not to bore completely.
But bore he does as his dude in downersville eventually lowers himself deep into the primordial muck he refuses to
ignore.
Movie review: `Friend' offers no balm for Russian angst
by Joe Heim
Seattle Times staff reporter
**1/2 ``A Friend of the Deceased,'' with Alexandre Lazarev, Tatiana Krivitska, Eugen Pachin and Angelika Nevolina. Directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich, from a script by Andrei Kourkov. In Russian with English subtitles. 100 minutes. Broadway Market. ``R'' - Restricted for nudity.
What happens when order and predictability give way to chaos and the vexingly unfamiliar? That is the central question of "A Friend of the Deceased," a Ukrainian film directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich that traces one man's struggles with marriage and career during Russia's emergence as a free market, post-Glasnost society ruled by thuggery, corruption and deceit.
In this slow-paced yet gripping movie, Alexandre Lazarev gives an edgy performance as Anatoli, an out-of-work translator with a failing marriage and few friends. In many ways his life serves as a metaphor for a Russia in transition and the accompanying terrifying uncertainty.
When Anatoli discovers that his estranged wife, Katia (Angelika Nevolina), is having an affair with a colleague at her advertising firm, he arranges a hit. Not on his wife or her lover, but on himself. It is the ultimate admission of defeat; a slumping resignation to the bewildering new environment and economy.
On the day of the scheduled murder, Anatoli shaves and dresses up in the smart style of Russia's new capitalist class. When chance allows him a reprieve from his date with death, Anatoli meets a young prostitute named Lena (Tatiana Krivitska) and soon realizes he wants to live. That, of course, means calling off the hit, which turns out to be no simple task.
With the plot's subtle twists come not-so-subtle jabs at the new Russia. At one point, Anatoli is offered a handsome sum by his friend Dima (Eugen Pachin) to give incriminating evidence in a divorce case. Anatoli stammers that he would be giving false testimony, to which his friend shrugs and asks, "What isn't false these days?" Later Dima tells Anatoli, "Today there are no friendships. There are only business relationships."
There are some heavy-handed moments - the melodramatic music is particularly grating - and the action occasionally drags, but the film succeeds in creating tension that is cerebral more than physical. Lazarev's Anatoli is a study in existential angst, symbolizing the misgivings of a people caught between a familiar if unloved past and an anything-goes capitalist present that is as immoral as it is immediate.
Suitably, the film's ending is as ambiguous as all that precedes it. There are no simple answers, no clever sorting out of facts. The film's central question remains intact - and unanswered. There may be a lingering over the past, but clearly there is no turning back. What is left is a jumbled acquiescence with the future where compromise and survival seem to be the only alternatives.
A Friend of the Deceased
BY FELICIA FEASTER
In a post-post-glasnost Kiev, the jobless, dejected Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev) embarks on the kind of mission more in keeping with the dire Stalin years than the bright promise of modern Russia. In A Friend of the Deceased, Anatoli's wife is on the fast track at an ad agency and has taken up with another bit of yuppie flotsam who whisks her away in his cherry-red sports car. Meanwhile, Anatoli sits alone in the apartment, stewing in the inappropriateness of his now-byzantine translator skills, rendered useless in the dawn of a new capitalist age. To his eternal damnation or redemption, Anatoli learns of a hit man who can help him exterminate his romantic rival. But director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's twist on this revenge scenario is distinctly, masochistically Russian: Anatoli hires the hit man, not to kill his wife's lover, but to kill himself.
With the usual Kafkaesque knife-twist to the belly, Anatoli contracts the killer, and then changes his mind when he meets a lively, gamine prostitute, Vika (Tatiana Krivitska), who momentarily restores his flagging interest in the big L. But his pal Dima (Eugen Pachin), owner of a Western luxury goods store, and therefore uniquely pragmatic about the base, exchange-value logic of the world, instructs, "Once you hire a killer, someone has to die." And the hit man won't take "nyet" for an answer.
A Friend of the Deceased asserts, yet again, that such tar pit cynicism is as ingrained in the Russian temperament as the indigenous embalming fluid, ice cold vodka. What seeps through in the films and novels of the region is the impression of psyches buffered by walls of thick concrete and a skepticism about life's abiding harshness which admits no warmth.
A Friend recalls the same morbid ennui of the first wave of films riding the glasnost wave, like Little Vera and Taxi Blues, which defied newspaper pleasantries of freedom and progress with verité portraits of the same-old-same-old.
Former Soviet bloc filmmakers such as Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski and Andrei Tarkovsky epitomized the coolness of tone which once typified this regional filmmaking, a pall that still lingers over A Friend of the Deceased like a soggy, mothball-funereal stench. This coolness extends to Friend's plain, measured storytelling which never invites full emotional engagement from its audience, but only a detached, observational witnessing of its hero's plight.
The film's often glum, directionless movement aside, what is amazing about Friend is how little the indigenous gloom seems lifted by the assumed beneficial tidal wave of whiskey, cell phones, flashy cars and car alarms (Krishtofovich has a real knack for picking the most obnoxious examples of Western "luxury" to indict capitalism) and all the consumer booty Russians once pined for. In Friend Russian yuppies pop into Dima's Western specialty store to buy Absolut, while shriveled, kerchiefed grandmothers scrape together enough change to buy an imported candy bar for their grandson's birthday. "Friendship disappeared with our glorious Soviet past. Now we only have business relations," says Dima.
Rather than a remedy for its historical malaise, such consumer opportunity is presented as a curse -- a Pandora's Box which has unleashed a social pox on the vox populi, where booze is purchased with the same nonchalance as a killer-for-hire. Because the Russian transition to capitalism has been so extreme, Friend can offer a ruthless, penetrating commentary on the system we already live under, presenting it not as a natural state of things, but as a mindset with damaging psychological consequences.
Austere and often oblique in its intentions, Friend is ultimately of more anthropological interest than it is a compelling piece of entertainment. By film's end, Krishtofovich's story has taken off on an obfuscating, wayward course, headed into parts unknown. A vague ending throws all of A Friend of the Deceased's preceding events into question in a way which leaves us with an unsatisfying, restless sense of a director who has lost sight of his story.
Review: 'Friend of the Deceased' unrelentingly glum
Web posted on: Wednesday, June 17, 1998 4:19:16 PM
From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- Movies don't necessarily have to be monuments to joy and the perseverance of the human spirit in order to be agreeable -- not by a long shot. But sometimes you find yourself watching a perfectly well-made film that's so possessed by glum aspirations, your mind starts to drift to anything you've ever seen with a glimmer of hope in it, something that can clear your palate of the unrelentingly bitter story that's unfolding in front of you.
"Friend of the Deceased," Ukrainian director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's morose take on the grayest emotions in the very politically gray city of Kiev, Ukraine, is one of those films. The performances are just fine, and there's some nice camera work, too, but it's a hugely single-minded grind. I was very pleased when it was finally over with, even though I seldom get to see something this purposeful nowadays. Everybody in the movie seems to need a laxative, or, at the very least, a stable government.
Everything about the movie is so depressed and downbeat, it took me a while to realize that the woman the main character is living with at the beginning of the story is supposed to be his wife. Alexandre Lazarev stars as Anatoli, an unemployed translator who's starting to get desperate for some money as well as, it turns out, some love. His wife, Katia (Angelika Nevolina), barely speaks to him and spends her nights in a bed of her own.
She's the breadwinner of the family, and this evidently has caused a rift in the marriage. The two act more like barely speaking roommates than a married couple, and it's not long before Katia abandons Anatoli in favor of her sportscar-driving lover. This moment is even photographed in a distant manner, with Anatoli watching silently from across the street as she leaves.
In a fit of despair (albeit the kind in which the tormented person's blank expression never betrays his feelings), Anatoli gets a friend to hook him up with a hit man who will kill the lover for a few hundred dollars. While on the phone with the would-be killer, Anatoli suddenly decides that maybe a more productive course of action would be to have himself rubbed out. He mails the hit man a photo of himself and the location of a cafe where the murder can take place. Then, a couple days later, he puts on a suit and strolls to the cafe to meet his maker.
At the cafe, he instead meets a sexy young woman named Lena (Tatiana Krivitska, whose winsome performance enlivens things a little). Lena, it turns out, is a prostitute. She takes Anatoli home before the hit man can carry out his duties, and sleeps with him for free, just because she likes him. This gesture is enough to make Anatoli want to go on living, so he hires another hit man to rub out the first one before he finishes the job.
Comedy so dark you need a flashlight
This sounds like the set-up to a pretty good black comedy, but if there's any comedy in this thing, it must be so black you need a flashlight to see it. Anatoli, reeling from the guilt of being involved in a murder, ends up visiting the widow of the deceased hit man (played by Elena Korikova), posing as the guy's friend. He wants to know if there's anything he can do to help her in her time of sorrow, but they end up having a fitful relationship that's an incredibly uncomfortable thing to watch.
The prostitute, Lena, who also goes by the professional name of Vika, winds up getting engaged to a guy who beats her and has plans of selling her into white slavery. Everybody else just drinks and bitches, and rightfully so. That's exactly what I would do if things ever got this morbid.
Perhaps the film's biggest problem (I couldn't exactly call it a failing) is that Anatoli is designed as something of a moral cipher, but you're supposed to simultaneously wish for his bad luck to change. He discusses cold-blooded murder so casually, I couldn't think of any reason why I should give a damn what happened to him. He would eventually get what was coming to him, anyway, even if he ended up spending the rest of his life in this film's version of Kiev, where everyone is already morally dead.
The fact that they're still all walking is just about the only thing they have going for them, and that wasn't enough to maintain my interest.
"Friend of the Deceased" contains nudity, sex, and rather excessive drinking if you're at all concerned about the characters' livers. That the most likable character is a desperate prostitute is all you need to know. Rated R. 105
minutes.
A Friend of the Deceased
Sony Pictures Classics
Director--Vyacheslav Krishtofovich
Starring Alexandre Lazarev, Tatiana Krivitska
Drama 100 min
Rated R
color
Soviet Hit Parade | Norman Green
"Friendship disappeared with our glorious Soviet past. Today there are no friends. There are only business relations."
This quote from Friend of the Deceased, describes the bind that freedom imposes on post-Soviet society, and on the movie's wounded hero.
It's a small, exquisitely crafted film, gorgeously photographed, gently and subtly paced. We pan in the open from the onion-shaped domes and spires of Kiev's Ukrainian Orthodox Churches into the breakfast nook of the beautiful protagonist, Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev). The shot, and so many shots that follow are framed and textured like Vermeer portraits, rich with melancholy.
We see Anatoli at his table answering want ads while his wife hustles off to her successful career. They are growing apart. She has another lover. The humiliation shows when she offers him money. It is obvious he is educated; he works for small sums of money translating Ukrainian into English and French. But his sensibility isn't valued any more. Anatoli stands for the lost post-Soviet citizens uncertain now how to make it in capitalism's cold, competitive cruel world.
He gets drunk with his friend one night and hatches a plan. He tells his drunken buddy he wants to take a contract out on his wife's lover. In fact he takes out a contract on himself, puts on a white shirt and a tie and sports jacket, and waits for death. Of course his luck changes dramatically for the better as soon as he takes out the contract.
Waiting for the hitman, he drinks. When the killer doesn't show, he reels into the street and picks up a sweet, childlike prostitute. He is so handsome she stays with him for free.
A chance to illicitly make a quick thousand bucks falls in his lap. With money in his pocket and a woman to love him Anatoli doesn't want to die. But he can't cancel the hit. Anatoli takes out another contract and has his hitman killed. Now he is a true post-Soviet. He is learning to cope in the brutal arena of capitalism.
Guiltily, Anatoli pays a condolence call on the dead hitman's wife. She serves him food and kisses him. Slowly, he takes his would-be murderer's place, even donning his house slippers. He shows up to celebrate the birthday of the dead hitman's kid. The movie's ironic circle closes itself in the last, lingering shot as the baby of the man he had killed looks up at sad Anatoli from his crib and says, "Papa."
In Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's Friend of the Deceased, the director of Adam's Rib explores the life of Anatoli, a semi-unemployed translator in post-communist Kiev. This quaint film explores the life of a man who is eventually to become that which he most fears.
Frustrated with his complete failure to find paying work (and the departure of his wife of many years, Katia) Anatoli is easily convinced by his friend, Dima, a store clerk, to take out a contract on someone to ease his troubles. "You can pay me later," Dima states, and thus Anatoli contacts the killer, giving him a photograph of the victim, along with detailed instructions on where to find him. Anatoli, of course, has no money to pay the contract, which is performed in advance, and thus, to ease all of his troubles at once, takes it out on himself.
Aleksandr Lazarev plays the part of the condemned Anatoli quite well. His surprise at finding the contract may have been the best thing to happen to him is very credible, as are the Kiev street scenes. Krishtofovich has assembled a very compelling film in Friend of the Deceased, but what this film truly does best is it's investigation of the transformation that comes over Anatoli.
After deciding that the contract is not such a good idea, Anatoli finds a means of evading it by hiring a bodyguard to protect him. Despite the relief he feels at having preserved his life, Anatoli also experiences guilt when he discovers a photo of the assassin's wife and daughter in dead man's wallet. Thus, penniless, Anatoli approaches the wife as a friend of the deceased.
Anatoli's conversion into a surrogate for the dead assassin brings to an end the cycle that saw him wallowing in the depths of self pity. His life is turned around, and so, we are to assume, are his prospects for obtaining good work.
What does Krishtofovich ask us in this film? I'd like to say he's suggesting a course for the Ukraine in future politics, but that would be a real stretch on a film so light as this. I have to admit I was a little bit disappointed with this film, although I did set myself up for it. While I was hoping for something that would offer the typical depth one expects of European films, I merely found a very well executed American-style film. It lacks only greater involvement with the dead assassin's wife, Marina. The most refreshing aspect of this film is Anatoli's relationship with Lena/Vika, a double natured prostitute. Charmed by his desperation, she begins following Anatoli, eventually using his position as the assassin's replacement to eliminate an abusive suitor.
Friend of the Deceased is still a charming film, and is certainly worth the three dollars to rent it from the video store. I've simply found that it ends just when things start to get interesting. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a romantic comedy with a foreign flair.
This film opens with its central character in his bathrobe, out of work and out of luck. Maybe this should be a sign unto us that the film will not include a whole lot of movin' and shakin'. What A Friend of the Deceased does include is a serious comment upon life in the Ukraine, amidst the rubble of a former communist country. What's missing in action and glossy, picture-perfect scenes is made up for by a film that calls it like it sees it in Kiev's newly-liberated society.
That's not to say that A Friend of the Deceased is without plot. Director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich delivers up a story line whose irony meshes perfectly with the lawless abandon that characterizes the present-day Ukraine. Shiftless protagonist Anatoli, played by Alexandre Lazarev (bearing a striking resemblance to a younger Judd Nelson), is a former intellectual and professor, occupations that are no longer useful in his infant capitalist society. As Anatoli sits by the phone perusing want-ads, his wife's career as an ad exec explodes. She leaves him first professionally in the dust, and then just leaves him. It's hardly a surprise to Anatoli, the clock ticking in the kitchen of their apartment had been counting down the seconds to her departure for a year.
With no wife and no job, Anatoli decides to hire a hit man--not for his wife's new lover, but for himself. Through a twist of fate, his path and the hired gun's do not cross at the appointed time, and Anatoli experiences an unexpected surge of joy at being alive. His days, however, are numbered, and Anatoli realizes that to stay alive, he has to kill off the hit man before the hit man finds him. It's a whole new way of doing business for a man who's accustomed to spending his days nursing espressos in the neighborhood bar.
The Kiev Krishtofovich presents is an interesting one, a city whose recent changes are impossible to ignore. The characters wear crosses around their necks, and Anatoli commands a startlingly beautiful view of the Russian Orthodox church out of his otherwise bleak window, and yet religion seems to be the farthest thing from the people's minds. The Ukrainians, Krishtofovich seems to say, are utterly without hope, and where once existed a fraternity between countrymen there is now an overriding self-interest. Lazarev delivers a strong performance and is supported by a strong cast, with the exception of Tatiana Krivitska as Lena, who seems too cheerful to be a prostitute.
A Friend of the Deceased says quite a bit about Krishtofovich's opinion of a free country, or at least the trappings that come with it. Anatoli's wife offers him money as a sort of a condolence for her waning love, and the red car belonging to her lover that comes to carry her away appears to be an unmistakable symbol of capitalism. It seems that Krishtofovich, like Anatoli, is not a friend only of the men whose lives end in the film, but also for the society that has been laid to rest.
FRIEND OF THE DECEASED
CityBeat grade: A.
Welcome to capitalism.
Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev) is an academic whose university background has become worthless in the new world order of the former Soviet Union. There is no hope for full-time work. So Anatoli strings together odd jobs, including translating English for the Ukraine's new businessmen. His ad exec wife Katia (Angelika Nevolina) is doing a lot better. She has grown accustomed to the new capitilist ways. She has also left Anatoli for another man. Emotionally vacant, Anatoli considers hiring a hit-man to kill his wife. He then considers having the hit-man kill himself. But a new friendship with a perky prostitute (Tatiana Krivitskaia) leads Anatoli to believe that maybe life isn't so bad after all. His problem, it seems, is that it might be too late to cancel the contract killer.
It's been six years since director Viatcheslav Krichtofovitch's last film, the acclaimed 1991 drama, Adam's Rib. A complete collapse of film production in the former Soviet Union forced Krichtofovitch to seek European funding. Friend of the Deceased's subtle brilliance makes the additional wait all the more painful. Krichtofovitch weaves a story that is tragically comic. With its sad sack protaganist, Friend of the Deceased also pokes fun at the political state of a western-ized former Soviet Union. But just because anything is possible doesn't mean that life is better.
Krichtofovitch gets extraordinary performances from his cast, especially Lazarev as the brooding Anatoli. Friend of the Deceased is a quietly, subtle human drama. Its storytelling is also deliberately cautious. Still, Krichtofovitch doesn't waste a single scene. Each moment rings emotionally true. And just when Friend of the Deceased looks to be overwhelmed by its own sense of despair, Krichtofovitch injects some welcome, although bitter, humor. The result is brilliant storytelling. (Rated R.)
A melancholy parable about an empty life in Kiev
Jay Stone
The Ottawa Citizen
A Friend of the Deceased *** 1/2
Starring: Alexandre Lazarev, Tatiana Krivitska, Eugen Pachin
Directed by: Vyacheslav Krishtofovich
Written by: Andrei Kourkov
Rating: PG (Mature theme)
Playing at: ByTowne Cinema, today to Thursday
(In Russian with English subtitles)
A depressed man takes out a murder contract on his own life, then meets an attractive young woman and discovers that the world is not so bad after all. Now to cancel that murder contract. Oops.
In a Hollywood film, even a subversive one like Bulworth, the serio-comic possibilities of suicidal second thoughts are played for political laughs, a broad black humour. In the Ukrainian movie A Friend of the Deceased, however, the theme becomes a melancholy parable about life in post-Communist Kiev, a town where you can order a hit the way people in the West can order a pizza, and where the empty streets are cold home to old friendships that have devolved into business relationships.
A Friend of the Deceased, which was the Ukraine entry in last year's Academy Awards competition for Best Foreign Film, is both a bittersweet love story and a regretful portrait of a society that has fallen a notch or two below capitalism and into a sort of polite anarchy.
It is a slow and mournful adventure tale about one man's attempt to come to terms with the new era. And as in all such adventures, slow and mournful or fast and loose, cherchez les femmes.
The man is Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev, a rakish mourner), who was a translator in the old days and is just another underemployed ex-academic today. He lives in a seedy apartment with his wife, the lovely blond Katia (Angelika Nevolina), who is thriving under the new regime. She is quickly outgrowing Anatoli: he scours the want ads for low-rent work while she has advanced into a job in an advertising agency and the associated accoutrements: a cell phone, fancy duds and a lover.
Anatoli's life is headed downhill, and director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich helps it along with slow shots of the quiet man at a tiny kitchen table as a pianist plunks sad classical doodles on the soundtrack.
When Anatoli confesses Katia's infidelity to his friend Dima (Eugen Pachin), a semi-legitimate merchant of fancy liquor, Dima announces he has just the solution: Kostia, a contract killer, who will be glad to take care of Katia's lover. Anatoli agrees reluctantly, then -- depressed by alcohol and infidelity and the oppressive coldness of the new Ukraine -- sends the killer a photograph of himself instead.
But Anatoli changes his mind the next day when he meets Lena (Tatiana Krivitska), a sexy gamine of a prostitute whose laissez-faire perkiness and refusal to charge for her services makes him feel a lot better about himself.
In addition, he has come up with a small bankroll, and there's nothing like a few American dollars in the pocket and a chippy on the arm to make a man unsuicidal.
The complications that arise from Anatoli's change of mind are not so perky, however.
"Once you hire a killer, someone has to die," Dima informs him: a contract is a contract, even in the new reality.
A Friend of the Deceased tells this story in a slow and precise fashion, creeping along the edges of its unspoken elegy to a Ukraine of old. It is filmed in Kiev, a city of faded sophistication, a half-empty metropolis portrayed as a half-world of a legitimacy that invents itself as it goes along. Director Krishtofovich (Adam's Rib) paints it in a faded wash that matches the reluctance of its tone. "Before we had friendships," Dima says. "Now we have business relationships."
The movie is the story of how Anatoli comes to terms with those relationships -- in sex, in love, in money -- and how he adjusts slowly to the new business of life. It's a life in waiting.
A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED
Directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich
Written by Andrei Kourkov
With Alexandre Lazarev, Tatiana Krivitska, Eugen Pachin, Constantin Kostychin, Elena Korikova, Angelika Nevolina and Sergiy Romanyuk
Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics
***
Warning: spoilers ahead.
There's nothing particularly original about the premise of A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED: a depressed man decides to commit suicide by hiring a killer. It forms the basis of Aki Kaurismaki's I HIRED A CONTRACT KILLER and Robert Bresson's THE DEVIL, PROBABLY, as well as a major subplot in Krzysztof Kieslowski's WHITE. As a friend of mine observed, it's even possible to imagine a Hollywood remake, in which our hapless yet innocent protagonist, possibly played by Tom Hanks, winds up learning a Valuable Lesson About The Beauty Of Life. The originality of the film lies in its commitment to the subjectivity of Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev), a suicidal, chronically unemployed 35-year-old intellectual. The style of A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED is determined by his desires (or lack thereof, as the case usually is.)
Although Anatoli is fluent in English and French, he can't find a steady job. (In the first of many omissions, the film never specifically states what kind of work he used to do.) His wife Katia (Angelika Nevolina), a relatively successful advertising executive, is about to leave him. In order to get by, he's reduced to degrading temporary "work" like translating a rather dubious deal for a thuggish businessman, complete with threats, and taking money to pose an adulterer in a divorce trial. He runs into his old friend Dima (Eugen Pachin), who seems to be doing better. Although Dima works as a salesman at a shop that sells liquor, coffee and tea, he hints at all sorts of underworld connections, including a hit man acquaintance. Suddenly, Anatoli sees a way out.
Tracking down the hit man Kostia (Constantin Kostychin), he takes a contract out on himself. He claims that he wants to kill his wife's lover but sends Kostia a photo of himself, with instructions to track down the "target" at his favorite cafe. The day of the appointment comes, but the cafe shuts down early for a private party for the owner's son. Anatoli goes out for a drunken night on the town, meeting a prostitute who goes by the name of Vika (Tatiana Krivitska). After sleeping with her, his life no longer seems so dismal, but he can't get up the courage to call off the hit, even when Kostia calls to inform him that he's still trying to finish the job. Becoming more and more desperate, he heads out to the country to hire a "bodyguard", an aging military man named Ivan (Sergiy Romanyuk). Ivan suggests that he hang out in the cafe, waiting for Kostia to show up. Anatoli reluctantly agrees, and when Kostia shows up, Ivan tracks him down and kills him. Feeling guilty and trying to make some kind of reparation, Anatoli gives the money from Kostia's wallet to his widow Marina (Elena Korikova) and turns the "contracts" that turn up in Kostia's P.O. box over to Ivan.
It would be foolish to over-generalize, but a new style seems to have emerged over the past ten years in post-Communist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: one that responds to the speed and chaos of modern life by mirroring it. As different as films like Kira Muratova's THE ASTHENIC SYNDROME, Srdan Dragojevic's PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME are, Lucian Pintillie's THE OAK and Otar Iosseliani's BRIGANDS: CHAPTER VII are, they share a bleak, cruel sense of humor and a tendency to pile incident upon incident and grotesquerie upon grotesquerie at a manic pace. responding to the speed and chaos of modern life by mirroring it. At their most lucid, these films aspire to function as homeopathic remedies. THE ASTHENIC SYNDROME depicted a man who responds to stress by sinking into a pathological state of depression and withdrawal; A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED is a different diagnosis of the same syndrome. Vyacheslav Krishtofovich shares some of the concerns of directors like Muratova and Iosseliani, but he expresses them in a far quieter, more austere manner.
The malaise that Anatoli suffers from has personal roots, but it's clearly a political one as well. In an interview included in Sony Pictures Classics' press kit, Krishtofovich opines that "the pseudo-liberalism which has replaced socialism in our country has also produced a disintegration in human relations. True, we weren't as free before, but this absence of freedom made people behave more warmly to one another. Real solidarity was apparent on every level of society. A joyous, underground society enabled us to bear the oppression." (Given the Academy's fondness for anti-Communist films from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED is probably not bound for an Oscar nomination, even though it's the Ukrainian candidate for Best Foreign Film.) However, the film's attitude towards the past feels far more elusive than Krishtofovich's statement would suggest, in part because it's not easy to draw the line between the feelings of the filmmakers and their characters. Krishtofovich's portrayal of the effects of capitalism on the Ukraine may be scathing, but there's little overt nostalgia in it. All of its characters act as if the world came into existence around 1989; the past, including the roots of Anatoli and Dima's friendship and the happy moments of Anatoli and Katia's marriage, is so distant that it may as well have taken place in another century. Ultimately, these ellipses feel rather evasive, as if Krishtofovich were reluctant to openly suggest that the quality of Ukrainian life was better under Communism.
In addition to this avoidance of backstory, Andrei Kourkov's screenplay makes knowing use of stock characters and situations: the concept of identity exchange between killer and victim and the male fantasy of the "hooker with a heart of gold," in particular. In a Hollywood movie, Vika would yearn to settle down with Anatoli, and the two would put each other on the road to "redemption." Here, she's an affectionate but distant presence, content to lead her own life, which occasionally crosses paths with Anatoli's. She has no intention of marrying him, and she's even willing to have him publicly humiliated on the street when he sees with her with another man. Kourkov is somewhat less successful at playing with the former concept; the irony of Anatoli's subsequent relationship with Marina gets laid on a bit too thick, especially in the final shot. Even so, the relationship remains ambiguous, mostly because it seems grounded more in Marina's despair and neediness than active desire on the part of either partner.
In fact, Anatoli never quite gets around to learning that Valuable Lesson. He never acts maliciously, but he's incapable of finding a way out of the fog of depression. Whenever he tries to do the right thing, the results are usually not what he intended. One moment best sums up his personality: spotting two potentially threatening men on the sidewalk, he stands still, forcing them to brush past him. He makes no attempt to get away, and he's astonished when nothing happens. Lazarev's performance is often extraordinary; Anatoli's passive nature seem to have sunk into his very bones. Furthermore, Vilen Kaluta's cinematography and Gueorgui Stremovski's sound design go a long way lending a visceral impact to Anatoli's point of view. Even though A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED takes place in the summer, the Kiev streets almost always look gray and overcast, and they look noticeably brighter on the rare occasions when Anatoli feels more optimistic. His phone becomes a frightening, noisy presence; at one point, he hands a portable phone to Katia as gingerly as if here were holding a vicious animal.
At its worst, A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED feels like a symptom of the amnesia that it describes. Krishtofovich and Kourkov do a terrific job of exploring the economic and moral decay of the present-day Ukraine, but they don't even attempt to dig into its roots. But for all its flaws, the film does accomplish something valuable: describing a volatile new society from the point of view of the people it excludes. Given the heartlessness that characterizes so much American public life (and so many American films), its empathy is welcome.
Vyacheslav Krishtofovich
A Friend of the Deceased
(Sony Pictures Classics) PG
it's worth $2.00
This soft-spoken film from the Ukraine has moments of tenuous suspense, brittle uneasiness, slinky deception and overwhelming sadness. Unfortunately, they're sandwiched in between long bouts of grating stillness and utter hopelessness. Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev) is an intellectual whose academic background has been rendered obsolete in the rabidly capitalist, crime-riddled, fast-buck chaos of the former Soviet Union. When his wife, a newly successful advertising exec, leaves him and a friend suggests hiring one of Kiev's ubiquitous hit men to rub her out, Anatoli declines. Soon after, depressed and despondent, Anatoli decides to anonymously engage the killer's services, but with himself as the intended victim. However, when the appointed date comes around for his demise, the cafe where Anatoli has arranged for the hit to happen is closed for a private party. Suddenly, after being given such a flukish break, Anatoli begins to rethink his plight. Perhaps, it's a precise conveyance of the bleakness and desperation of life in the Ukraine these days, but as far as succeeding as an engaging film, it's dead in the water.
A Friend of the Deceased
DIRECTED BY: Vyacheslav Krishtofovich
WRITTEN BY: Andrei Kourkok
PHOTOGRAPHY BY: Vilen Kaluta
STARRING: Alexandre Lazarev, Tatiana Krivitska, Eugen Pachin, Constantin Kostychin, Elena Korikova
RUNNING TIME: 1 hour, 40 minutes
RATED: R for nudity, violence, adult subject matter. Sony Pictures Classics. In Russian with English subtitles. Opens today at the Chez Artiste.
By Steven Rosen
Denver Post Popular Movie Critic
May 29 - "A Friend of the Deceased'' was the official Ukrainian entry for the foreign-film Academy Award, and though the Academy didn't nominate it, I like it better than the film that won the Oscar, the Dutch "Character.'' "Friend'' doesn't have the audaciously theatrical style of "Character,'' but it has more heart. And it feels more important. In its somber and restrained way, the movie isrevelatory about the diffidence and unease accompanying life after an enormous change.
In this case, that change is the dissolution of Soviet communism. "Friend'' certainly isn't nostalgic for what is gone. But it is fearful that capitalism is as cold and spiritless as the dark, rain-slickened cobblestone streets of Kiev, where the movie was made. Director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich, whose last film, "Adam's Rib,'' was a hit at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, is about a thoughtful man troubled by the future. In that regard, "Friend'' has universal appeal.
Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev), who is 35 and adrift, is a translator struggling to find work in the new, free Ukraine. He must do "dirty'' jobs, such as helping a crude, Russian-speaking food broker negotiate the price of fruit offered by an English-speaking merchant. Or worse, lie in court that he had sex with a woman whose husband seeks a divorce. His own wife, a philologist who works for an ad agency, has become successful with the new consumer lifestyle. She even carries a cell phone in her purse. And when she leaves Anatoli, he finds another free-economy advocate, a hit man who works for surprisingly little money, to kill her new lover.
His contact with the hit man is by mail and phone; murder has become impersonal in the new Ukraine. But feeling remorse at his own life, Anatoli impulsively puts his own photo in the envelope for the hit man, thus seeking suicideby-proxy. The story is reminiscent of "Bul
worth,'' and in both movies the central characters are driven to suicidal thoughts by politically derived personal despair. And in both, their redemption comes from meeting unusual women.
A drunk and emboldened Anatoli wanders into a swank Kiev bar and picks up a young prostitute. The latter is played by Tatiana Krivitska, a short-haired and compactly built Jean Seberg-like ball of fire. She likes him and refuses money, which causes him to be joyful. So he tries to cancel the hit, which is easier said than done. He must hire a former soldier to pro
tect him from his would-be killer. This story strand - only one of several in the movie - reaches its apex in an unforgettably vivid and sad scene that occurs outside a coffee bar, while an exposed electrical wire fires sparks into the dark rain. At such moments, "Friend'' is like a compact, chilling noir thriller.
But while "Bulworth'' mines its character's predicament for wild and scabrous humor, "Friend'' takes a different path. It is laconic and terse, nervous and tentative. The movie internalizes the fear that Anatoli has about his life. Its tone is almost fatalistic, as if hope is nothing more than the next bottle of vodka that its characters all keep drinking. "Friends'' is so tightly edited that it sometimes is hard to follow the many plot developments. But it benefits from showing us Kiev. In particular, Anatoli's visit to a housing development on the city's outskirts, where high-rises and construction cranes tower above the dirt roads, is like a trip to urbanplanning hell.
The film also gains tremendously from Lazarev's performance. Tall with longish and messy dark hair parted in the middle, he makes the sullen Anatoli someone whose internal turmoil is palpable. There is also a fine, ruminative score by Vladimir Gronski that uses the quietly melancholy interplay of piano and sax to good effect.
One of the best things a movie can do is make you feel that life matters in a part of the world you don't ever think about. "A Friend of the Deceased'' does that in a way that has a haunting, long-lasting impact.
A Modern Kiev Man
Buddy System: Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev) finds a belated reason to live when he meets Lena (Tatiana Kriviskaya).
Capitalism dogs Ukrainian man in 'A Friend of the Deceased'
By Michelle Goldberg
IT'S ALMOST UNCANNY that Bulworth and the Ukrainian film A Friend of the Deceased are opening at the same time. In each, a man takes out a hit on himself after being ground down by his country's relentless capitalism and then learns to love life again with the help of a spunky, marginalized girl. But in each case, it's too late to call off the assassination.
What's stranger still is that despite the incredible similarities, each film is totally specific to its own country. While Bulworth only makes sense in the context of American politics, A Friend of the Deceased can only be understood against the background of the manic transition from communism to brutal consumerism in the former Soviet Union.
Unlike Bulworth, a comedy about a political insider suffering over his hypocritical compromises, A Friend of the Deceased is a plaintive moral drama about a man who can't adapt to modern capitalism. An intellectual who had once made a living as a translator, Anatoli (played by sexy, sad-eyed Alexandre Lazarev) is unemployed in the new Kiev, while his cell-phone-toting wife, Katia (Angelika Nevolina), who is flourishing, decides to leave him for a man with more money.
An old friend, Dima (Eugen Pachin), urges Anatoli to take out a hit on his wife's lover. Dima's darkly comic casualness in contacting the hired killer is the first indication of how anarchic and treacherous the Ukraine has become. "Haven't you learned to adapt?" Dima shouts at Anatoli. "Friendship disappeared with our glorious Soviet past. Today there is no friendship, only business relations."
But Anatoli isn't interested in avenging his wife's betrayal; he wants to die but seems to lack the energy to kill himself. So when the killer tells him to deposit a picture of his wife's lover in a post-office box, Anatoli gives the hit man a picture of himself instead, along with the address of his favorite cafe.
On the appointed night, however, the cafe closes early. Realizing he won't die that evening, Anatoli goes on a drunken spree and meets (surprise, surprise) a sassy-but-caring call girl, Lena (Tatiana Krivitskaya). Enlivened by his run-in with this consummate indie-film cliché, Anatoli tries to call off his murder. Failing, he hires a second killer to get rid of the first.
There's a suspenseful chase scene in the second half of the film, but A Friend of the Deceased is much more a philosophical drama than an action film. Director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich portrays a country full of pathos and moral ambiguity, where the chintzy nouveau riche ignore beggar women on the street, former soldiers find work only in the underworld and the line between passivity and criminality is nearly imperceptible. A Friend of the Deceased certainly isn't one of those hit-man-with-a-heart films, but by the end, the two hired killers seem as much victims of circumstance as Anatoli himself.
A Friend of the Deceased (R; 100 min.), directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich, written by Andrei Kurkov, photographed by Vilen Kaluta and starring Alexandre
Lazarev.
CALLOUS NEW CAPITALISTS
"A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED"
100 minutes | Rated: R
In Ukrainian with English subtitles
Opened: Friday, May 15, 1998
Directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich
Starring Alexandre Lazarev, Tatiana Krivitskaa, Eugen Pachin, Constantin Kostychin, Elena Korikova, Angelika Nevolina, Sergiy Romanyuk
Suicidal Ukrainian symbolizes lost kindness in post-communist Kiev
I thought "A Friend of the Deceased" was going to be a comedy. The concept sounded funny to me.
A suicidal Ukrainian who's having a hard time coping with raging capitalism sends a photo of himself and a bundle of money to a hit man, then changes his mind and spend the rest of the picture on the run.
I'm thinking Peter Sellers. I'm thinking Roberto Benigni. I'm settled in for giggles and guffaws as the bumbling fellow stays one step ahead of the assassin.
Oops. Not a comedy.
I'm telling you this because having to change mind sets in the middle of this picture might have clouded my judgment and I thought you out to know that outright.
"A Friend of the Deceased" is, in fact, a symbolic, socio-political drama about the rapidly-changing face of the former Soviet Union.
Anatoni (Alexandre Lazarev), the suicidal hero, is an unemployed former government translator who is finding it difficult to keep up with hastily Westernizing Kiev.
His once warm and altruistic countrymen have turned cold and callous, worshipping at the alter of the almighty buck with little regard for each other.
A simple man with no particular thirst for wealth, Anatoni tries to make ends meet with under-paid translation jobs a couple times a week Meanwhile, his beautiful, estranged wife seems to have slept her way to the middle of a rising company. She comes home each day dressed in fine clothes, carrying a cell phone and not bothering to hide her affair with her boss. Then one day she doesn't come home at all.
In the throes of depression, but with no stomach for traditional suicide, he uses his last few American dollars to arrange a hit on himself, which he quickly regrets after meeting a pixish prostitute who seems to be the last person in Anatoni's world who values him at all.
"A Friend of the Deceased" is director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's eulogy to the dying brotherhood that the communist system brought out in the common man.
While he shows parts of Kiev blossoming under the onset of free trade -- some locations are clearly prospering and seem as quaint and cobblestony as any idyllic village in Europe -- he sees his country's new freedom being trampled by profiteers.
The angular, handsome and brooding Lazarev has a wonderfully expressive face that personalized this message. He seems to bear the tread marks of the changing Russian economy. Yet for all its depth, the picture identifies too heavily with the lethargic Anatoni -- a burden that drags on the story like an anchor.
"A Friend of the Deceased" is peppered with tasty ironies that offer moments of hope that the film might pick up (the hooker marries a john for money, Anatoni get involved with his assassin's wife). But the story is always encumbered by the hero's lack of motivation, and the results, however poignant, are too listless to be engaging.
Movie Takes
By James Bowman
A Friend of the Deceased
A Friend of the Deceased (Un Ami du Défunt), a Franco-Ukrainian film directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich and written -- in Russian -- by Andrei Kourkov, has a very attractive premise. Tolia (Alexandre Lazarev), a translator living in Kiev and living a hand-to-mouth, hustling sort of existence not untypical of life in the former Soviet Union, finds that his rather glamorous wife (Angelika Nevolina), who has begun to make much more money than he does, is having an affair with a colleague at work. His drinking buddy, Dima (Eugen Pachin), who has underworld connections, has a sentimental attachment to family values and offers to procure a hit man to kill the lover. It seems only a drunken gesture, but when the information about how to contact the killer arrives, Tolia is so depressed that he substitutes his own photograph for that of the proposed victim and writes on the back of it where he will be -- at the Café Art -- at an appointed hour.
When the time approaches, however, the cafe closes early for the celebration of the proprietress's son's 18th birthday. Tolia is put out onto the street with no place to meet his assassin. So he gets drunk, meets an attractive young woman called Lena (Tatiana Krivitska), goes to bed with her and decides that life may be worth living after all. The problem is that, as Dima tells him, "Once you hire a killer, someone has to die." As it is only a matter of time before he is found and killed, the only thing for Tolia to do is to hire another hit man, an ex-Red Army officer called Ivan (Sergiy Romanyuk), to kill the first one.
It sounds like a great comic plot, but the film, though it ends (as one may say) happily, is not exactly a barrel of laughs. What it is instead is an often moving portrait of the post-Soviet Ukraine where nearly everybody has to have more than one identity to survive -- and one of the identities is generally unsavory. Tolia's wife, like him, is trained as a philologist, but she works in advertising; Lena moonlights as a prostitute and calls herself by a different name. Ivan lives a bucolic if primitive existence in a fishing camp when he is not murdering people for money -- and not very much money. His asking price is $500 per hit, but he takes $350 from Tolia.
It is quite an accomplishment, I think, to put across to Americans, spoiled by prosperity which they have long taken for granted, the brave and sympathetic characters who make their living by doing what to us seems repugnant. The original hit man, Kostia (Constantin Kostychin), is a sort of post-Soviet yuppie, working overtime to support a pretty wife, Marina (Elena Korikova), and child and hoping to use the proceeds to pay for more education. In such a world, human relations -- love and loyalty and family and friendship -- are both more fragile and more meaningful. The require real sacrifice. When the more experienced Ivan fulfills his contract on the youthful Kostia, Dima expresses as much emotion as he is capable of. "Kostia's been killed," he says to Tolia, not knowing of the latter's having arranged it. "That's life." And he remarks on the widow and the orphan.
"Was he a friend?" asks Tolia.
"What friend?" says Dima. "Friendship disappeared with our glorious Soviet past; now there are only business relations."
As if to prove this proposition, Lena announces she is going to marry a rich client and go on an exotic honeymoon. "Nothing changes between us," she cheerfully tells him, and she presents him with a bottle of brandy. "Drink to my happiness." Then she adds, just like his now-vanished wife: "Do you need some money?"
In the end, it seems that all anyone can know or care about anyone else is what Dima says of Kostia -- "that he was reliable; you could count on him." Yet Tolia's conscience has somehow survived his straitened circumstances, and he tries when he doesn't have to make some amends to the now-widowed Marina. The portrayal of the relationship between the two of them, conceived in barely suppressed desperation on both sides, is very moving and more than worth the price of admission.
A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED
Starring: Alexandre Lazarev, Tatiana Kravitska, Eugen Pakin, Angelika Nevolina, Elena Korikova.
Screenplay: Andrei Kourkov.
Director: Vyacheslav Krishtofovich.
Life in post-Communist Ukraine has not been kind to Anatoly (Alexandre Lazarev). A respected academic and linguist before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Anatoly now finds his skills useful only for translating business deals at a few dollars a shot. Even his wife Katia (Angelika Nevolina) is finding a better deal in an affair with a co-worker. Feeling depressed and obsolete, Anatoly decides on a thoroughly market-economy solution to his woes: through a friend (Eugen Pachin), he hires someone to kill him. The problems ensue when Anatoly changes his mind, and the only way to end the contract on his life is to hire another killer to eliminate the first.
This might seem like the premise for a slapstick farce; in fact, it might sound strangely similar to the premise for Warren Beatty's current Bulworth. But like Bulworth, A Friend of the Deceased takes that premise and steers it into some astute social commentary. Director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich and screenwriter Andrei Kourkov may romanticize the Communist past, but they also paint an intriguing picture of people adapting to the capitalist present. Many dive into the world of crime without any understanding of the potential consequences -- a bright-eyed young prostitute (Tatiana Kravitska) believes she can marry a violent man and still carry on with her work as though nothing had changed, while a hired killer leaves behind a wife and baby when his profession finally catches up with him. It is left to Anatoly to grasp the dangerous course his country is on, and to take a step which will turn compassion into a marketable commodity.
A Friend of the Deceased might have been an even more compelling film if it had been more consistent, both in tone and pacing. At times it takes on the tense atmosphere of an espionage thriller; at other times, it has the loping pace of deadpan comedy; at still other times, there is the stark sincerity of domestic drama. Each is effective in its own way, but in combination they can leave you wondering how you're supposed to feel about the strange events in Anatoly's life. Fortunately, that confusion plays a significant role in this story of complex social change where the rules are still being determined. It is also fortunate that Alexandre Lazarev, with his soulful eyes and weary decency, makes for such a sympathetic tour guide through this world. A Friend of the Deceased is a slightly blurry window onto a morally-blurry world and the people trying to survive while they try to make it all a bit more clear.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 shaken Kievs: 7.
'Friend': A dour look at the world
By Joe Baltake
Bee Movie Critic
(Published May 29, 1998)
A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED
Rated R
Rating: Three stars
Cast: Alexandre Lazarev, Tatiana Krivitska, Eugen Pachin and Constantin Kostychin.
Director: Vyacheslav Krishtofovich.
Writer: Andrei Kourkov.
Cinematographer: Vilen Kaluta.
Composer: Vladimir Gronski.
Distributor: Sony Classics.
Running time: 100 minutes.
Spoken in Russian with English subtitles.
Offical site: "A Friend of the Deceased"
In a coincidence of timing that can be so typical of movies, "A Friend of the Deceased" ("Priatel Pakoinika"), the dour new comedy from post-Communist Ukraine, has the same plot point that also drives Warren Beatty's "Bulworth."
Not that there's anything new about a depressed guy who resorts to taking a contract out on himself -- only to have a last-minute change of heart and discover it's too late to terminate the order. The wheels have been set in motion and can't be stopped. But what's really fascinating is that both movies vividly illustrate their respective filmmakers' disillusionment with the way their worlds have evolved and their countries turned out.
Beatty is just as unhappy with America as director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich is with the new Ukraine. The only real differences between the two movies are that, with "A Friend of the Deceased," we hear Russian being spoken (accompanied by the usual English subtitles), and in lieu of Hollywood or Washington, D.C., we get Krishtofovich's hometown of Kiev, which apparently has gone through a makeover that's caused the chill of the Cold War to linger.
As is usually the case with progress, bits and pieces of the old coexist uncomfortably with the new -- and naturally, those bits and pieces that were good about the old guard are exactly what have been replaced by the new.
According to Krishtofovich, the Ukraine is now an unfortunate hybrid, a combination of the worst of communism and the worst of capitalism.
As a result of changes, an intellectual like Anatoli (played by Alexandre Lazarev, who has the dark good looks of an old Hollywood star) has fallen through the cracks. A translator by profession, fluent in French and English, Anatoli can't get the kind of work he used to enjoy. He's about 35.
Now he does work for shady free-market businessmen who have developed an attraction to black-market activity and a penchant for back-stabbing. But mostly, Anatoli just sits at home, waiting for his taped-together speakerphone to ring, while his estranged wife, who works for a high-powered ad agency, inches closer and closer to capitalism.
You'd never guess that Katia (Angelika Nevolina) wasn't an American. Her hair has been dyed the brightest of blondes, her little power suits with their short skirts smack of Ally McBeal and she always has a cell phone in her hand or against her ear. She makes deals -- and dates -- as Anatoli languishes. And Katia cheats on him openly with a guy with a smart red sports car.
Stop the world! Anatoli wants off.
When a buddy, his only friend now, suggests that Anatoli hire a hit man to rub out his wife's new paramour, Anatoli takes him up on it. Only he decides to have the anonymous hit man rub him out instead. And he knows exactly where he wants it to happen. Anatoli wants to die in his favorite coffeehouse -- drinking cappuccino. "There are no friendships now," Anatoli's buddy tells him, wising him up, "only business relationships." Sound familiar?
The deadpan film -- which was one of the foreign-language Oscar nominees this year -- is very funny in a dry, dry way about the assorted colorful characters who come into Anatoli's life during his supposed last few hours, life-affirming types who give him reason to change his mind.
When he finds to his horror that the plan can't be changed, he decides to hire yet another hit man to rub out the original hit man before the original hit man rubs out him. Now, he's scrambling to survive -- despite all the changes.
Like Beatty's Jay Billington Bulworth, Anatoli is a paranoiac who finds a reason to live. Unlike Beatty's film, however, "A Friend of the Deceased" isn't electric and all over the place, but rather slow-moving and rather cautious -- and mild-mannered, a lot like its protagonist.
Both films, however, make the exact same point. The language may be different but the culture, alas, has become the same -- the world over.
A Friend of the Deceased
Be it country or be it marriage, breaking up is hard to do
by Shawn Levy
of The Oregonian staff
The demise of culture is a popular topic among American pundits, who see portents of Armageddon in every new strip mall and rudely named rock 'n' roll band.
But few Americans have ever watched a culture collapse, not gradually, but suddenly and swiftly, the way things happened to Russians and Eastern Europeans when the U.S.S.R. broke up.
The Soviet capitulation was hailed as the global triumph of capitalism, and perhaps it was, but it was something else, too: order swallowed by chaos, a way of life unhinged by anarchy. For most people, there are times when order — any order, even a despised one — is preferable to the alternative.
This political reality is the background and metaphorical touchstone for A Friend of the Deceased, director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's somber, noir-like new movie that was the official Ukrainian entry in this year's Academy Awards competition for best foreign film.
Beneath the sex and espresso of an attractively bohemian contemporary Kiev, Krishtofovich and writer Andrei Kourkov reveal a world dancing while it falls apart — a city of gangsters, black-market deals, go-go economics and hired killings contracted so casually and cheaply the true horror lies in their matter-of-factness.
The "friend" of the movie's ironic title is Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev), a translator and intellectual who simply can't make his way in the new grab-your-chance whirl of the post-communist world. Handsome in an Andy Garcia way, Anatoli is soft in the center, a lamb in the new world of capitalistic wolves. Unable to peddle his academic skills and unwilling to turn to manual labor, he simply drifts — a pretty face staring at his phone, stepping out for espresso, watching while his wife, Katia (Angelika Nevolina), who has found rebirth in her new job at an ad agency, spins away from him and into an affair with a fellow rising young capitalist.
Life changes for Anatoli when he stumbles across an old buddy, Dima (Eugen Pachin), who works in a liquor store and makes deals with the underworld. One drunken night Dima offers to set Anatoli up with a hired killer to knock off his wife's lover. ("Family is sacred," Dima insists.)
Seeing a chance, Anatoli takes out the contract — on himself. (By coincidence, Warren Beatty's new political satire, "Bulworth," also opening today, turns on the same plot twist.) A tumble with a perky young prostitute, Lena (Tatiana Krivitska), persuades Anatoli that life may be worth living, after all, and he tries to cancel the contract but discovers he can't. His only choice is to hire a second killer to kill the first killer before he's killed himself.
Krishtofovich unravels Anatoli's tale with such a deadpan humor that the comedy practically ceases to exist. It's a bleak kind of laughter, anyway, and far more accessible to Europeans who understand its social implications than to Americans who are only vaguely aware of those countries' cultural crises. "Before, we had friendships," Dima says sadly. "Now, we have business relationships."
Krishtofovich's casting is appealing: Krivitska, as Lena, is sexy and bouncy, with a touch of Liza Minnelli gaminess; Elena Korikova, as a hit man's widow, is exotic in a wounded-deer way; Sergiy Romanyuk is a contract killer in the gruff John Cassavetes mold. But Lazarev plays Anatoli as such a cipher that it's hard to care much what becomes of him, which pretty much leaves viewers with the political metaphor.
A Friend of the Deceased moves slowly and schematically; you spend much of the film waiting for something — anything — to happen. Part of the point is that evil slips up imperceptibly, catching people unawares. But in a movie, inaction is inaction no matter how you explain it
away.
`Friend' mourns for grim life in Ukraine
By Ed Blank
TRIBUNE-REVIEW FILM CRITIC
Jobs are so scarce in Kiev, in the confusing new freedom of the former U.S.S.R., that women are turning in increasing numbers to prostitution and men are becoming assassins for hire. Black markets flourish. It's that bad in Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's portrait of Ukraine, "A Friend of the Deceased," from a screenplay by Andrei Kourkov.
The hero Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev) is in a serious malaise. He can't get paid for work he already has done. His wife, the ad executive Katia (Angelika Nevolina), leaves him. And all around Anatoli, people such as his barkeep friend Dima (Eugen Pachin) observe that people were closer when they didn't have so much freedom - when they understood where they stood.
Dejected and finally depressed, Anatoli orders a hit on himself, but indirectly. Too proud to allow it to look like suicide, he submits his photo (vainly posed for and freshly taken by a professional photographer) to the contract killer Kostia (Constantin Kostychin) through a mail drop.
But after Anatoli's chance detour on the night he's to be bumped off and a carefree date with the prostitute Lena, who also calls herself Vika (Tatiana Krivitska), he decides his life isn't so hopeless.
But the hit is on and can't be canceled. What's Anatoli to do but hire a second contract killer, Ivan (Sergiy Romanyuk), to deflect the first?
To complicate Anatoli's ambivalence about everyone and everything, he finds himself drawn to the first assassin's wife, Marina (Elena Korikova).
If the central situation sounds familiar - the hit on oneself that can't be canceled, it may be because it was used later, and badly, in a picture that opened here first, "Bulworth."
Krishtofovich's movie begins too lethargically, with its unrelieved Russian heaviness. Anatoli's ennui becomes the audience's until, close to midway, the strings get yanked together and his yen to survive creates tension and pathos.
"A Friend of the Deceased" has recurring echoes of past versus present and of multiple and misrepresented identities. What's most distinctive about it is something you don't find in American movies of the past half century: a survival instinct so strong that people put aside what isn't there for them anymore and move on to the next lifeline.
REVIEW
A Friend of the Deceased
Directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich
Featuring Alexandre Lazarev, Tatiana Krivitskaia
As the second film by Ukrainian director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich (Adam's Rib) unfolds, you wonder whether the recent spate of politically-incorrect, American-produced, decidedly unsubtle black comedies (in the vein of Very Bad Things or Dead Man on Campus) is having a profound effect on you. You may, after all, be surprised to find the characters you most easily relate to are two contract killers.
The reason for this is twofold. First off, A Friend of the Deceased examines the spiralling crime rate in Ukraine in the wake of the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the opening of the nation to global market forces. "Just like in Stalin's time," languages student Anatoli (Alexandre Lazarev) sarcastically comments, after reluctantly agreeing to perjure himself at a rich businessman's divorce trial, only because he needs the money.
In this climate, it's easier to sympathize with young father Kostia (Constantin Kostychin) for his chosen profession - contract killer. Anatoli, having consumed too much vodka and suffered too much depression thanks to his inability to find work or save his marriage, takes suicide to a new dimension by hiring Kostia to kill him. Shortly thereafter, we're introduced to the second contract killer, Ivan (Sergiy Romanyuk), a more seasoned-looking warrior who lives in a shack and sits by a pond, fishing. Hired by a suddenly-reformed and understandably-frightened Anatoli to take care of Kostia before Kostia takes care of Anatoli, Ivan seems like a guy who was wise enough to know what was happening before Communism began to falter, but hardened enough to have been in the thuggery line of work even before it was a part of the culture.
We don't sympathize with Ivan, but we certainly believe the strong portrayal of actor Romanyuk. This comes in stark contrast to our perspectives on the other main characters in A Friend of the Deceased. Particularly difficult to relate to is Lazarev in his portrayal of Anatoli, a man who is supposed to undergo a great transformation and find new meaning in life. The only real change is that he talks a little more in the second half of the film; other than that, the depressed, suicidal Anatoli is a bit of a cardboard cut-out, outwardly showing no anguish. And later, the uplifted, optimistic Anatoli is a more talkative cardboard cut-out, possessing the same dull expressions as before.
The woman who supposedly drags him from his depression, a prostitute named Lena (Tatiana Krivitska) returns his feeble expressions of emotion with some of her own, creating an entirely unbelievable romance. Each also faces troubles in their old relationships and the lack of emotion shown by both in this regard makes these situations difficult to believe as well.
These weak performances are the downfall of what could have been a great film built around a creative plot. As it stands, A Friend of the Deceased is still an intriguing take on the present state of Ukraine.
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