The main character as we are introduced to him, is a little somewhat wizened Siberian Yakut who spends his day (his life) stoking furnaces, shovelling coal, beneath some industrial belching towers. He is alone in this rigid cold landscape of iron, coal, furnace eternally shrouded in deep snow. When he takes a break from shovelling (and he methodically spends much of his time easily shovelling) he steps over to his living area at the side of the furnaces. He has a small bed, which doubles as a chair, a small table upon which sits his one possession - a typewriter. He goes over to his typewriter between shovelling and writes his novel, with one measured finger poke after another. Hunting and pecking each letter.

As the film unfolds it become clear this small thoughtful man had been a major in the army during the Afghani conflict. Head of a corps of engineers, the guys who had to build the roads and bridges and take away the mines and other devices meant to stop their progress. His own story is that he is a war hero who got shell-shocked after an injury and now he shovels coal in a basement and types his beloved story, one painful finger-peck at a time.

Of course, he has ex-comrades from the army who are now mafiosi and arrive regularly, like clockwork to stuff bodies of their enemies into his furnaces. He blind-eyes their activities, after all they are comrades, and continues hunting and pecking the letters for his story.

We only hear about his story when his one mafiosi-ex-comrade comes over after stuffing dead people into the furnace, sits on the bed with him and asks 'what's happening in your story now??' And the man tells him the next chapter or episode.

As the film unfolds, the man's beautiful but greedy daughter is involved with these mafiosis and of course gets dispatched and burned in her own father's furnace. When he discovers the yellow shoe, one of a pair he had given her for her birthday lying on the ground beneath his furnace, we have 10 minutes of looking at his face and the workings of his mind as he accepts the horror of what has happened, then goes out on a killing spree and dispatches ALL of his once comrades, quickly and silently.

He then makes the long arduous walk and bus ride with the camera holding on his freezing thought torn face - back through the icy winter snow to his furnace room, pulls a large stuffing-falling-from-it chair before the open furnace and deftly and emotionlessly cuts his wrists as only an ex army man can. (At this point what I love about foreign film as opposed to american films, i.e. films from other cultures: the absence of a need to fill the space with words. So much is understood once a character has been fleshed out. All we have to do is see their face to know what their mind is saying)

 

Anyway.. as he is dying before the furnace, quietly and with dignity, a little girl comes in, who throughout the film has visited him to hear his war stories and ask about the story he was writing. She asks if she can take a photograph of him as he dies with her polaroid camera, then waits for him to become completely still and deftly removes the typed pages of his novel from the table top and the final sheet from the typewriter and goes skipping off home.

Next over a black screen we hear her child's voice telling us the story the Major had written and the film cuts to a sepia movie, shot in 19th century Siberia.

The story appears to be about his Yakut ancestors and their relationship to the Tzars convicts sentenced to labour camps in the far north. His tale, in particular, is of a Yakut couple who are forced to take in a convict, as in that frozen world, even white convicts(criminals) have pecking order over indigenous peoples. The story as he wrote it, with his own ancestors and maybe his own not so distant story in mind, was that the convict beats up his host and locks him into a root cellar, then chases and savagely rapes the man's wife. The last scene of the film is the convict stretching himself lazily like a big cat and stalking off into cold winter sunlight, the Yakut man frees himself from the root cellar and then savagely beats his wife for having brought all of this trouble on them.

Then the film cuts to black.

It left me so thought-provoked about the nature of people in hardship and the good nature of some, buried in their hardship and the cruelty of others who really have no nature at all.

Funny thing, throughout the film, I was hoping all the people, the mafiosis and the women with their shaved pussies who bent over regularly, compliantly, would somehow end up dead. In the end, the most unlikely hero actually went and cleaned the clock of all this human detritus, but, as with the fate of all 'heroes', at the cost of his own life.

The human myth goes on. Are we gods? Are we the misshapen misanthropes of our creator's? What are we that we are so complex, so cold, so deep, so shallow, so important and so quickly disappear?

You can tell the film flipped a switch in my head.

Bye again