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Shultes
[Shul'tes]
Russia, 2008
Color, 100 minutes
Russian with English subtitles
Director: Bakur Bakuradze
Screenplay: Bakur Bakuradze, Nail Malakhova
Cinematography: Marina Gornostaeva, Nikolai
Vavilov
Cast: Gela Chitava, Ruslan Grebenkin, Liubov'
Firsova, Cecile Plaige, Vadim Suslov
Producers: Sergei Sel'ianov, Iuliia Mishkinene
Production: Film Company STV, Company Salvador
D, Limon Studio
Winner of the grand prize at this year’s Kinotavr
festival, Shultes provides a stark depiction of human
isolation and alienation. It begins with a close-up of its
hero, Lesha Shultes, who, after a lengthy silence announces,
“I don’t remember.” This one sentence is left to serve as
an explanation for much of the behavior of this small-time
pickpocket until the closing moments of the film, when the
cause of his memory-loss is revealed. Until then we watch
as Lesha negotiates his world with a disconnectedness mitigated
only by a supreme competence born out of necessity. His relationship
with his mother, with whom he lives, consists of uninterestedly
watching the television and administering the medicine he
shoplifts for her. When he visits his brother, it is to give
him money and dodge questions about how he came by it. When
he meets Kostia, a preteen pickpocket, it seems like the child
might save him from isolation, but their relationship never
really moves beyond a business partnership.
In many ways his most meaningful relationship
throughout the film is with the notebook he carries with him
to note down things he needs to remember. At times, however,
this substitute for his memory proves inadequate. Sometimes
Lesha can’t remember what he should be looking for and sometimes
it is too dark to read. The notebook, despite its faults,
provides Lesha with one of his last links to anything deeply
personal, as is poignantly demonstrated when, near the end
of the film, he refuses to show it to his doctor. As the film’s
director, Bakuradze put it, “when we lose our memories we
practically lose our connection with the world.”
Even though Shultes is a crime film
and there are numerous scenes in which Lesha displays his
skill as a pickpocket, this criminal activity takes place
in the context of more quotidian activities. Watching Lesha
spend his take at the grocery store, for example, gives the
impression that theft, for him, is just a job―not unlike the
one he applies for at the auto repair shop. Bakuradze has
gone so far as to suggest that the function of crime in the
film is largely metaphoric, saying that “by stealing objects
and stories from other people’s lives, this character fills
in the empty cavity of his own ‘destiny”’ that was left by
his loss of memory. Despite this downplaying of the criminal
aspect of his work, violence does haunt the film and its ending
can be seen as an inevitable conformation to the demands of
its genre.
In keeping with many recent Russian crime films,
the gritty urban periphery of Moscow provides the setting
for the film. This landscape of shopping centers and apartment
complexes, identical except for the color of the paint stripe
in their stairwells, is as emotionless as the hero of the
film.
Lesha’s inability to make real connections to
those around him is made tangible for the audience by the
film’s unsettling construction. The film is filled with lengthy
shots, many taken from an unmoving camera, which makes the
film seem much more disjointed than it really is—because each
episode consists of only one or two shots, the movement from
episode to episode ends up being quite jolting. The soundtrack,
which is dominated by the ambient noise of the city, also
highlights Lesha’s alienation—one potentially emotional moment,
for example, is overwhelmed by the churning of the washing
machine in his apartment.
Incidental music is also conspicuously absent
from the film (even the opening and closing credits are silent),
offering added importance to the two instances of music that
do occur. Following their first job together, Kostia downloads
a ringtone to Lesha’s cell phone: a cheesy pop tune, the chorus
of which asks, “Are you Lesha or not?” The rest of the film
is punctuated by the tinny cell phone voicing of this existential
question, the seriousness of which is constantly being undercut
by its source. Music is heard in the film a second time when
Lesha breaks into the apartment of a woman he has robbed,
but has subsequently seen in the hospital after she suffered
an injury to the head. He watches a video she recorded for
a lover at the end of which she lip-syncs an English love
song, the chorus of which announces “I’ve found the one I’ve
waited for.” This moment, mediated by a television and a tape-recorder
is, nevertheless a moment of real connection, grounded in
the loss shared by both characters—the same loss that through
the rest of the film denies Lesha that kind of connection.
Bakur Bakuradze
Bakur Bakuradze was born in 1969 in Tiblisi,
Georgia. In 1998 Bakuradze graduated from the State Institute
for Filmmaking (VGIK) from the workshop of Marlen Khutsiev.
Following his graduation he directed several documentary films
and co-directed an award-winning short, Moscow (2007).
Shultes is Bakuradze’s first full length feature
film.
Filmography:
2008 Shultes
2008 Road of Dreams (documentary)
2007 Moscow (co-directed with Dmitrii Mamulia; short)
2005 The Diamond Way (documentary)
2002 Viacheslav Pilipenko (documentary)
2002 The Age of Minfin (documentary)
2001 At the Cost of One’s Life (documentary)
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