A Room and a Half

A Room and a Half

130 Minutes

Films, maybe more than any other medium, lend themselves to creating a reasonably accurate reproduction of the mechanics of memory. While film is capable of capturing the kaleidoscopic assault that is the act of remembrance, the quality and clarity of a collected body of memories is variable, and the degradation of a memory’s accuracy has less to do with the passage of time than with your mind’s inexplicably motivated selectivity. Various seemingly unrelated images – the texture of the linoleum floor of a friend’s house, the color and shape of a rupee from the original Zelda game, the way a particular tree on a particular road swayed in a particular wind – flash in the mind, sometimes cohesively and sometimes with very little appreciable logic, as supplements for a more cogent memory or for one of your retroactive fabrications alike. As difficult as memory can be to approximate, I think there are few things that lend themselves more to its examination than montage.

A Room and a Half attempts to be a film about memory, and does a good job of approximating its aforementioned flashy, associative nature, but the thing is, it’s about a person other than its director (Andrey Khrzhanovsky); it’s about the Nobel Prize-winning Russian expatriate poet, Joseph Brodsky, and it suffers in that it is an essentially autobiographical story that is not actually an autobiography – it attempts to infer someone else’s perspective and symbolic order of images. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t ring true all of the time. I feel underserved by my lack of familiarity with Brodsky’s work, but a caveat at the end of the film states that it was wholly fictionalized. Perhaps that’s true, but it toes the line pretty heavily, even incorporating some actual home video footage of Brodsky on a couple occasions. At the same time, Khrzhanovsky is the same age Brodsky would be today if he’d lived longer, so it does feel a bit like a joint biography. The film is most effective when it’s about a generalized childhood experience of Russia in the ’30s, or when it’s about more universal ideas, like the sensation of longing for something that you can’t have. Brodsky’s unique situation, getting exiled from Russia in 1972 for “social parasitism,” i.e. poetry, is what drives the film forward; a framing device of him in his last year (Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy), sailing back to the motherland to see his parents once more (a trip that never happened) is the wellspring for all his various recollections. The film focuses entirely on his relationship with Russia and with his parents, barely touching upon his time in the States or his work, aside from an occasional bit of voiceover, sometimes from the actor and sometimes from the real Brodsky, reading pieces of his poetry over the action on screen.

Memories of his childhood in St. Petersburg show a number of younger versions of him macking on girls at the movie theater, running around town in a Guy Maddin-esque silent film homage style that beautifully incorporates archival footage as a part of its world. A memory of World War II shows a pilot in his cockpit, filmed in 2009, firing wildly over a swooping image of St. Petersburg from a news reel. In an animated sequence, a cat alter ego flies a Da Vinci glider device over the city, representative of Brodsky’s boundless potential and excitement as a kid, cut short by smashing straight into a statue of Stalin that springs up out of nowhere. Later, a young Brodsky cooks some meals with Stalin, all within the replicated layout of a cookbook, moving illustrations in the 1952, state-released Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, which was an ironic bit of propaganda that was meant to, somehow, draw attention away from the food shortages Russia was suffering from at the time.

If this movie is a parallel biography, its approach is what constitutes Khrzhanovsky’s part of the story – the cinephilia of Brodsky’s youth, which may or may not be true, the way that movies are constantly an explicit part of how he goes about depicting Brodsky’s life, the way that Dityatkovskiy’s voiceover narration constantly makes glib asides about how some moment or another was “kind of like a movie.” There are possible allusions to the French New Wave and Tarkovsky that I was able to catch while watching the film; there’s probably a bunch more that I didn’t even notice, or wasn’t equipped to. The movie’s approach, its phantasmagoric visual style and non-linear storytelling, is its greatest virtue, but, since we’re on the topic of Tarkovsky, this movie is no Mirror. It often fails at creating interesting connections between its selected moments, instead making much more obvious statements (like that Stalin statue springing out of nowhere to knock the cat out of the air from earlier) or wandering somewhat aimlessly from one moment to another.

A moment early on in the film illustrates A Room and a Half’s overall shortcomings, which are largely due to an occasionally lackadaisical effort at creating a sense of unifying rigorousness: older Brodsky stands on the deck of his metaphoric cruise ship, staring off into the distance. A rippled water effect comes up, fairly transparent, over the shot. The camera pans away from him, slowly across the ship’s deck. A fading superimposition of his parents dancing flashes up for a moment and then fades away – the pan continues and his parents materialize in his childhood apartment before cutting back to him on the deck. As a standalone image, it’s kind of effective and pretty, but within the context of a scene in a movie that has already established itself as being primarily about memory, all it really does is visually reinforce in an uninteresting way the substance of its, already clear, pursuit; a gesture towards meaning that is not ultimately meaningful. Even so, when I think back to it, my selective memory only lets me experience the pleasurable texture of its construction, its freewheeling style and structure.

by Andrei Alupului