Film Festival 09 - Paper Soldier
Paper Soldier
Bumazhny soldat, Russia 2008, 118m
Director: Alexei German Jr
Festivals: Venice 2008; Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films
2009
Winner Best Director and Best Cinematography, Venice Film Festival
2008
Alexey German Jr's chronicle of Russia's 60s space programme is the
anti-Right Stuff. The cosmonauts who are shaping up to make history
are hunkered down in bleakest Kazakhstan. The contraptions they
train on might have been designed by da Vinci. They are the paper
soldiers of the title, playthings of the state, preparing to
venture where only dogs have gone before. Daniel (broodingly
handsome Merab Ninidze), is the physician who monitors their
health. Shuttling between the wintry base and his circle of
intellectuals and artists in Moscow, he is increasingly disturbed
by what he's seeing. Though regarding the optimistic spirit of
Soviet liberalism with distance and irony, German taps into the
invigorating modern aesthetic of the era's cinema. His constantly
tracking camera maps out the existential limbo of the Cosmodrome
and follows its nervy, discombobulated denizens with a grace to
mesmerise any true lover of giant screen poetics. - BG
In Russian and Georgian, with English subtitles
www.papersoldier.ru
