While watching Nicolas Rey’s 2001 film, THE SOVIETS PLUS ELECTRICITY, I couldn’t help from wondering how on earth I was going to describe it.

First, there is the practical description. The film was shot on expired, Soviet produced Super-8 at a choppy 8 frames per second and blown up to a grainy, discolored 16mm, making the film appear to be set in one of those artificially colored WWII reels. It tells the story of Rey ostensibly seeking his past as he rides trains, boats, and trucks from Paris, France to a city called Magadan on the Pacific coast of Russia. I say “ostensibly” as the audience is only presented with brief mentions of Rey’s history, which only seem to hint at this being the reason for the narrator’s trip. Wanderlust, a thank you message to France’s unemployment department for funding the trip, and a Russian pop song about Magadan seem just as likely to be responsible.

Then, I could provide the symbolic and thematic description, how the film’s gargantuan 175-minute run time, shown over the course of three reels, fits in with the equally gargantuan Russian wilderness. How the French monologues about travel, engineering, and his surroundings from Rey blend with quotes from Lenin and the sounds of power plants as well as drunk Russians representing the east meets west mentality of Russia in the years following the USSR. How, even in the remotest towns of Siberia, we see the same pipes, smoke stacks, and playgrounds that we first saw in the Ukraine, hinting at the former scope of the USSR and their goal to cultivate industry. As Lenin stated in a quotation that inspired both the title of this film and the attempted conversion of the Russian wilds to an economic powerhouse, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

The film is by no means a documentary on the state of the former Soviet Union, however. It’s an inside look at the old Soviet interior, sure, but through the view point of Rey himself, who, aside from detailing how Magadan was a destination on the way to the gulags, avoids going into History. Instead, we get snippets of monologues, often delivered over a black screen, how things are, such as him bribing the Ministry of Natural Disasters into letting him tour Chernobyl. And I do mean snippets – the narrative is as fragmented, choppy and tangential as the 8 frames per second the film is shown in, making the film seem more like a dream or a memory than a travelogue.

So then, is it good?

Well, sort of. The first reel, featuring his departure from Paris and travels into Ukraine, felt the most abstract, with many monologues delivered over black screens or unrelated shots of people or places. After a half hour of this, I was satisfied, making the next half hour more than slightly grueling, and quite a few members of the audience seemed to have trouble finding their way back to their seats following the five minute intermission after the first reel.

I can’t say that I blame them, but I do feel bad for them, as the second and especially third reel were much, much better. The remoteness of Siberia, which is documented on these reels, seems to have helped Rey become more focused. Instead of tangents on how he wished he had purchased a suit case with wheels and random shots of random city corners, these reels seem go into detail describing the rivers and rugged tracks he traveled, as well as the people he met along the way, all shown over the rugged beauty of Siberia in the early autumn.

At 175 minutes, its a long haul to Magadan, but one that is ultimately worthwhile.