Customer Reviews

From the East

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is not true that this film/DVD has been "Discontinued by the manufacturer." - it is out now. don't know why Amazon says this.

Great film with Chantal Akerman's wonderful style and eye for detail, marred by noisy visuals. I'd be interested to see if Criterion could clean this up at some point. It certainly deserves it.

This 1993 film by Chantal Akerman resembles some of her best early experimental work from the 1970s, especially `Hotel Monterey'. This is a truly non-narrative film. Just a series of images from across Russia; often slow, amazingly long tracking shots (probably made from a car, but somehow rock steady), intercut with some long stationary wide angle shots, and shots of people in rooms, clearly staged. There's no dialogue and almost no music, only the incidental sounds of the place being photographed.

The film is clearly a comment on how lost Russia was at that moment in history after communism fell - a lifetime of one ideology was suddenly gone, and nothing new had yet taken it's place. We see it in the faces -- every person looks like they're waiting for something. The only problem for me was the length. At 110 minutes both images and ideas, terrific though they were, started to feel repetitive.

This is a very interesting, almost real-time meditation on life in the former Soviet Union. It starts a little slowly, but stay with it. The film consists of extended footage of life as it was lived - some of the sequences are wonderful. You feel like an observer visiting a very different universe.