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Known for his glacial pacing and deliberate, opaque storytelling,
Russian director Alexander Sokurov would seem to be the ideal candidate for a documentary
on Russian naval officers in the bleak, icy Baltic Sea. Titled
Confession, this four-hour effort was split into
five parts and shown on Russian television. True
to form, it’s intriguing, poetic, minimal and occasionally dull; compared to this,
the director’s modest crossover success Russian Ark
looks like a Hollywood musical.
Sokurov’s focus is mainly on the ship’s captain, and includes
voice-over taken directly from his diary. A
melancholy depressive prone to staring out his porthole for hours on end, the captain
proves to be a kindred spirit to the director. Sokurov
opens the film with his own voice-over, which eventually serves to turn the
captain—his name is never given explicitly—into a sort of metaphysical hero. He stares down the harsh, unforgiving environment
and wards off the inconsolable boredom of his life by memorizing entire stories by
Chekhov. Part 3 of the film is an extended
discussion between the captain and a colleague, centered on their nostalgia for the 19th
century’s military way of life, its old-fashioned pedigree of nobility. As the captain puts it, back then “officers
would carry around Makarov bullet, for when life gets too senseless, you must put an end
to it.” Now, the army offers only
tedium, providing no more than a meager chance for survival, a way to maintain order after
the collapse of socialism.
To illustrate the point, Sokurov plunks his camera down in the cramped
belly of the ship, where dozens of new recruits sit, patiently waiting their turn to be
stripped down and examined by the ship’s medical team. They
joke with each other occasionally (much of their spoken dialogue remains unsubtitled), but
for the most part they reveal a daily routine of mass isolation. Peeking through the crawlspace that makes up their
bunks, Sokurov’s voice-over repeatedly notes the absolute lack of privacy on board; Confession is always aware of the irony of a large
group of men living in such close quarters without any real possibility for communication.
They wake up, get out of their Potemkin pajamas, make the bed, stand around on the frozen
deck awhile, and then go back to bed. In their
position near the Arctic Circle, they rarely see daylight.
Despite the captain’s frequent admissions of foreboding, very
little happens to the crew of the ship. There
is a sequence involving a small powerboat dispatched to an abandoned outpost to drop off
coal, but this mainly serves to illustrate the captain’s assertion that his existence
is stuck in another era. Given his approach to
filmmaking, it would have been unfair to expect The
Life Aquatic with Alexander Sokurov, but the ice floes and swirling snowflakes—so
thick they at first appear to be computer-generated—become the antagonists of the
film. The environment takes on a sublime,
terrifying power, prompting the captain to compare the waves to a “dark forest.” The film ends on the image of a delirious young
sailor, shivering and trembling on deck, where the captain finds him composing a letter to
his family out loud. In his frostbitten
stupor, he gets caught on the opening address to his mother, skipping like a broken record
over the phrase “my dear mother.” It’s
a moving and disturbing image of a life in limbo, as good as any in the film.
- Jesse Paddock
