Silent Souls (2010)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Expected more

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Clocking in at a very economical 78 minutes Aleksey Fedorchenko's "Silent Souls" is a remarkable and remarkably beautiful Russian film dealing with both grief and identity but in a manner that is both uplifting and almost surrealistically comic. It is the kind of film that Abbas Kiarostami might make or, in a much broader fashion, the Coens. The plot is both simple and minimalist. A man's wife has died and he wishes to take her body to be buried in the spot where they had spent their honeymoon, and in the custom of their race, but he does not want to involve the authorities so he enlists the help of a colleague, Aist, the film's narrator and its central character and it becomes a road movie unlike any other. Almost nothing happens and yet there is a great feeling that in the midst of death life goes on and that people continue to struggle for happiness at all costs. It's a melancholy subject but it isn't treated in a melancholy way. Little is actually said; these are indeed silent souls and what little story there is unfolds in almost totally visual terms and the cinematography of Mikhail Krichman is superb. An outstanding film that certainly doesn't deserve to get away.

From the outset the film is slow and looking for tension: the camera work achieves the mood very well. The shots of the Volga are beautiful.A man's wife dies, and he calls a friend to help bring her body to the lake where they had their honeymoon and to burn her body on the lake in their ancestral tradition.The real drawback of the film is the dialogue - nobody speaks like that!!! The dialogue is strained and extremely formal - so much so that it is comical - which loses the pace and tension. This is unfortunate, since the film otherwise communicates very well the brutality of the ancient pagan world view.

This was a fairly interesting movie. Just to correct errors in two of the previous reviews above: this is not a Scandinavian movie, but Russian. It is not located in remote Northern Scandinavia, either, but in central Russia, and thus actually quite far from Scandinavia. Although the movie tells about traditions of a people ethnically related to Finns, there is really nothing in the movie that would resemble anything in Scandinavia. These Meryan people merged with Slavs about a thousand years ago, and their own language disappeared in the 16th century. Apparently some of their ancient customs still live, if this movie is to be believed.

I saw this film 8 hours ago on a big screen and I'm still spelled.The camera work was very precise and poetic just as the structure of the story line and acting. This movie is very slow, yet very intense. Every scene generates so much thought in the viewer and leaves room for imagination, so that after the first few scenes my mind was swinging in the shamanic rhythm of the movie. I actually saw some older people lightly dandling themselves in that rhythm.It's much more than just a story of a nation that is disappearing. It is a story of all the human culture and the mortality of it. The mortality of our beloved paradigms. Yet this film looked at life from the brighter side. Everything disappears, but so what? Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost.