Leningrad

On January 27th , to mark the 66th anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad, Cine Lumiere screened the British premiere of Alexander Buravsky’s Leningrad.

The film has already been released in Russia (including an extra 15 minutes of material that the director assumed a western audience would not understand).

It is to be released on DVD in the UK in February, but is not on general release.

A British woman journalist finds herself trapped in the siege. She is taken in by a Russian policewoman, while her British newsman boyfriend tries to rescue her.

The siege detail is painstaking and authentic: an opera diva asks whether a meat pasty is ‘human?’ ‘Onion’ comes the reply, as she stuffs it into her mouth. The NKVD waste their time searching for spies and ‘enemies of the people;’ the starving hack the flesh from a still-living horse. The battle scene in the beginning left me stunned with admiration (once again) for the heroism the Leningraders showed in the defence of their city.

However the fim is marred by too many plotlines and an absurd central story. I found myself quite indifferent to the fate of ‘Kate’ and her ‘Mr Parker.’ Although it has subtitles, the film also seems to be partially dubbed. The policewoman and neighbour children speak in late twentieth/early twenty first century American English. Expressions such as ‘it’s the real deal’ made me squirm in my seat.

I can only welcome this attempt to bring the siege to a western audience, yet the film fails because the director tries to give a western audience what he imagines we want to see. And so we are presented with unconvincing (and poorly acted) ‘westerners’ - as though the siege itself were not ‘story’ enough.