SILENT SOULS is an extraordinary adventure about ritual and tradition
SILENT SOULS (OVSYANKI) (Aleksei Fedorchenko, 2010)
Angelika Film Center
18 West Houston St. at Mercer St.
Opens Friday, September 16
212-995-2570
www.silentsoulsfilm.com
www.angelikafilmcenter.com
After his wife, Tanya (Yuliya Aug), suddenly dies, paper factory boss Miron Alekseevich (Yuri Tsurilo) recruits his best friend and employee, Aist Sergeev (Igor Sergeyev), to join him in a Finno-Ugric ritual farewell to the young woman. The two Merjan men prepare the body in the traditional way — which includes a thorough cleansing and the tying of colored threads to her pubic region — and then begin the multiday journey to Lake Nero. Aist, who lives a relatively solitary life, brings with him his pair of beloved buntings, the two men in the car and the two caged birds off on a road trip of a very different kind, with the deceased woman wrapped in a blanket in the back. Along the way, Miron “smokes,” telling Aist intimate details of his and Tanya’s sex life, which is also part of the Finno-Ugric funeral tradition. Siberian-born director Aleksei Fedorchenko’s third feature film, Silent Souls is a touching, elegiac poem about love, friendship, and the ancient rituals of a Russian culture that has not fully assimilated into the modern Slavic ways. Beautifully shot by Mikhail Krichman and with an evocative score by Andrei Karasyov, the film includes long scenes with minimal camera movement, placing the viewer in the car as the men drive down a dirt road or in a hotel room as Miron gives Tanya an erotic vodka bath in a poignant flashback. The two men never talk about work, about the state of the world, about what comes next in their lives. Instead, they quietly go about their business, keeping their traditions alive. Previously shown at the New York, Toronto, and Venice film festivals, Silent Souls is an extraordinary seventy-five-minute adventure into the heart and the soul.