When your girlfriend sends you on a multi-day train journey to Russia’s Far North in the middle of winter just to get you out of town, it doesn’t bode well for the relationship. Such are the circumstances of the unnamed protagonist (Seidi Haarla) in Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No. 6. A Finnish student living in Moscow to study the Russian language, our heroine appears to be hiding in someone else’s life. She’s enchanted by her older lover Irina’s (Dinara Drukarova) bohemian, intellectual milieu, and its values and priorities become her own. So when Irina arranges a trip to the northern city of Murmansk to see petroglyphs (ancient rock paintings), the woman doesn’t hesitate to go along — nor to complete the journey solo when Irina suddenly cannot make it.
The film presents a sensitive portrayal of a foreigner’s emotional malaise. Despite her proficiency in Russian, the woman remains on the periphery of her environment, oscillating between invisibility and scrutiny. There’s an amorphous social barrier that she can’t quite overcome, and she seeks out space apart, away from others’ wary gazes. The film relaxes into these small refuges: lavatories, phone booths, the landings between train cars. Whereas so much of the woman’s life is borrowed, these hideouts are her own.
But Compartment No. 6 is not just the Finnish student’s story. The movie is in fact a cerebral buddy film about the woman and her bunkmate on the train: Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), a Russian miner heading to Murmansk for a job. Unfortunately, the nuance the film applies to its Finnish protagonist is not afforded her Russian counterpart. The movie self-consciously establishes Ljoha with a string of transparent clichés: he’s a hard-drinking goon who spouts patriotic platitudes and doesn’t even know what petroglyphs are — not to mention the fact that he greets the woman with a heavy dose of sexual harassment. After this clumsy ploy to engineer the audience’s distaste for the character, the film proceeds with a series of reveals to convince us that actually, he’s a great guy. He’s kind to old ladies! He’s not homophobic! He didn’t steal the woman’s camera, it was some other, worse person! Rather than develop Ljoha and give his character shape, the film reacts to audience assumptions — assumptions it ham-handedly insisted we make. The movie inflicts a similar arc on another, supporting character: a surly train attendant (Yuliya Aug) who begins the film by snapping at her passengers, but who later on — you guessed it — turns out to have a heart. Where, you ask, does this leave viewers who aren’t shocked that working-class Russians can be nice? It’s difficult to say.
The evocative cinematography by Jani-Petteri Passi partly distracts from these narrative foibles. It renders the cramped compartments and corridors in a delightfully vivid way that builds up the specific social order of the train. The second class compartments are the site of a bizarre combination of intimacy and estrangement; roommates fill their cabins with stinks and snoring without even exchanging names. The restaurant car is a warmly lit escape hatch where passengers salvage some of their dignity, and linger as long as possible before paying the bill. The life of the party, however, is clearly in the third-class train cars; everyone is thrown in together and few boundaries can be maintained. We catch only glimpses of this world, as the two leads occasionally pass through, dodging feet that stick out into the aisles. These moments are brief, but memorable. At one point, amid the hubbub of the train car, we see a pair of middle-aged men in their undershirts hunched over a table, struggling to repair a Rubik’s Cube. It’s a single shot with more to say about travel, camaraderie, and futility than any of the contrivances in the central storyline.
Compartment No. 6
2021
dir. Juho Kuosmanen
107 mins.
Opens Friday, 3/11 @ Kendall Square Cinema
