Set in a vaguely Venetian but patently Slavic underworld that's all cloud-covered, water-lapping texture--tilting, overcast, sibilant--Alexander Sokurov's 1993 feature seems to chart the topography of a world in which scenes from "Crime and Punishment" play out, dreamily and arbitrarily, in the midst of a vast field of debauchery and decay. A man and woman who seem to be Raskolnikov and Sonya are erratically glimpsed in scenes that recall the original; but Sokurov's attention will wander to long-held shots of the nameless city's soot- and dew-covered buildings, or a postcard of a nineteenth-century artist's fantastical vision of an urban megalopolis--sustained for minutes on end. And in the background always is Sokurov's trademark--a soundtrack of the very acutest sensitivity, a Breughel-like canvas of sound so dense and so just-out-of-reach, it becomes a world you spend the entire running time grasping toward.
Sokurov lacks his mentor Tarkovsky's dramatic sense (not that the master had much to begin with). But I think he exceeds him in aural and visual poetry. Sokurov's work with distorted, seemingly handmade lenses, which give his films a pebbled, mottled, leaning-away-and-falling-toward look, have no analog in the rest of cinema, or photography either for that matter. The pace of Sokurov--glacial right up to the line of "narcotic"--may drive some to distraction (as it did when I saw WHISPERING PAGES in Los Angeles). Depending on your mood and blood sugar, it may also, in this phantom, menacing world, be just what the doctor ordered.
Sokurov lacks his mentor Tarkovsky's dramatic sense (not that the master had much to begin with). But I think he exceeds him in aural and visual poetry. Sokurov's work with distorted, seemingly handmade lenses, which give his films a pebbled, mottled, leaning-away-and-falling-toward look, have no analog in the rest of cinema, or photography either for that matter. The pace of Sokurov--glacial right up to the line of "narcotic"--may drive some to distraction (as it did when I saw WHISPERING PAGES in Los Angeles). Depending on your mood and blood sugar, it may also, in this phantom, menacing world, be just what the doctor ordered.