Closeness

🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 stream / download

🎙️ EPISODE 686: 04.07.23 To live in a place where it just feels like you're waiting for something horrible to happen because it already has. You can feel its inevitability in the air between every breath. Only question is to what degree, not whether or not the pain will come. It's coming. So what? people had a problem with the inclusion of a real Islamic Terrorist video. As if that line is something sacred like white chalk on a playing field. Don't worry about the line! It's much better that way. (More on this HOT BUTTON TOPIC on the podcast, I can assure you.)

The director of Beanpole's first movie (he's 2/2, batting a 1.000 — to keep the strained sports metaphors afloat — so a tiny lil D.F. is in order, why not?), Kantemir Balagov has done something fairly rare with this late 90s period piece based on a "true" story (there's that word again dammit!) about his small town of Nalchik in the southwest corner of the motherland. This somewhat slow burn is a fascinating character study made up to look like a kidnapping saga in disguise. Darya Zhovner shines in the lead role of Ilana, a character too insignificant for / unworthy of be kidnapped. I love the subtle (and then not so subtle) stuff about religion and gender and even war and children becoming freethinkers, and how you can make a movie about ALL those difficult topics without making a movie ABOUT them.

The film has a misty quality to it where it seems like we're floating, sometimes at an incredibly sluggish pace (we spend 20+ minutes watching young people getting high at a gas station and watching TV and then the aforementioned "snuff film," as I read it described by a Top Critic™, apparently an actual VHS the director stumbled upon when he was a teen). Of course there's resonance, substance, but it's more about the void created in the wake of these "big ideas." Because that's how it goes. You get fucked up with your boyfriend's friend and it's mostly nothing, just the easing of a variety of pain, then you throw an empty 40 bottle at one of their heads when they say something antisemitic.

The difference between the love a mother has for a son vs. that of a daughter, the "closeness" of these bonds, is examined. (This is somewhat culturally or experientially specific, but still interesting nonetheless.) Ilana's brother and his fiancé are taken and a ransom demanded. The cops are useless, if not complicit. They're offered the money by another Jewish family in exchange for Ilana's hand in marriage to their own prodigal son. The thing is he's a really nice guy, not bad looking either. He's fine! (And her gas station bf seems like a dope on top of it, tbh.) It's the loss of freewill that's at the heart of the matter. She won't go through with it but they leave the cash anyway. The father touches the money envelope almost sexually before he goes. It's an act of consummation minus the climax. The brother returned and then they can't stay because of the shame of his sister, their daughter. And then this ungrateful bastard son won't even come along now because, well, thanks for saving me and all but I got my own shit going on here, ya know?

The story ends with the fleeing trio (father, mother, daughter) having a picnic when their car breaks down. Mom puts her son's old jacket on Ilana's shoulders before embracing her. She wants to get close, but knows she'll never be close enough. A brilliant film.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 685C - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 687 ⫸

---

Closeness (Russian: Теснота) is a 2017 Russian drama film directed by Kantemir Balagov, in his feature film debut. It was selected to compete in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. At Cannes, it won the FIPRESCI Prize in the Un Certain Regard section. It was released on August 3, 2017.