Sex is politics and politics is sex in Kirill Serebrennikov’s recklessly beautiful, wildly entertaining English-language debut “Limonov: The Ballad.” This punk rock epic moves at the pace of a train coming off its tracks across Moscow, New York, Paris, and back to Russia again, starring Ben Whishaw in a career-crowning lead performance as the self-styled alternative poet and political dissident Eduard Limonov (who died in 2020). Based on French writer and journalist Emmanuel Carrère’s biographical novel, “Limonov” spans the 1960s to near present-day Siberia to tell with orgiastic excess the life story of the eventual founder of the National Bolshevik Party, which married a far-left youth movement to far-right fascist ideology. But while Limonov’s politics are inextricable from the libertine hedonist he was, Serebrennikov’s film is more a purely pleasurable romantic odyssey than political deep dive, radiating a countercultural energy that smacks of freewheeling ‘70s cinema more...
- 5/19/2024
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
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