A man walks out of the house with a grim face, distraught and exhausted, he turns a corner and hobbles down the dusty empty country road that leads into the distance, he has one foot bandaged and walks with a cane, he has only underpants and slippers and paints an image of misery. The vastness of the land is breathtaking in this film, but it is not one that suggests loneliness and emptiness, abandonment or depression.
The film was shot in widescreen format, you have space and time to watch. The houses are neatly and generously placed side by side, small birch trees stand in the gardens, the laundry flutters on the line, the topography of a wonderfully harmonious neighborhood. A village in the Sakha region of north-eastern Russia, people speak Yakut. The furnishings of the houses are cumbersome, there is a lot of space and large windows. An idyll: outside a natural nowhere, inside bourgeois way of life.
The film “Yt” – the German title is rather clumsy – brings together seven episodes, seven studies in matters of neighborhood and solidarity. Some are exemplarily condensed, almost abstract, conflicts are often settled with a shotgun – or triggered. There are also attractions, once there is talk of a solar eclipse, for this you have to get tinted glasses. On home moviein which a fatal end cannot be ruled out.
Reality resists any tendency towards parables
Village society functions according to the simple laws of action and reaction. Scenes and encounters develop slowly, always following the same rhythm. A man steps out of his house, goes to the fence and strikes up a conversation with the neighbor who is digging a ditch on his property, there is something that needs to be sorted out that his wife couldn’t manage. He lights a cigarette, then the debate begins. What are you doing… I’m digging a new outhouse… But you already have one back there… It’s full… But it’s not good that you’re making the new toilet right next to our vegetable patch. .. Gas conversation ends without an agreement. Action remains to be taken. From which, in turn, a consequence of action arises.
The Covid pandemic is shadowy over the film. It was 2020, says director Stepan Burnashev, “a lockdown was announced in Yakutsk. I went to my home village of Amgu with my family to write a screenplay. I thought it would take two weeks, but it ended up being two months . I talked to my colleague Dmitry Davydov (he lives in the same settlement) and the project was born. I had one episode ready and each of us quickly wrote three more. We agreed with the actors, most of the local people, already with film experience, searched locations and shot everything in two weeks. With a miserable budget, two hundred thousand rubles.”
A young man has found himself a bride, but suddenly he’s waving a gun around among the people who are there to congratulate him – he’s holding the gun more lovingly than the bride. The village elder comes and tries to defuse the explosive situation. To do this, he has to assiduously think up toasts and down more than one bottle of schnapps.
Every idyll has a nasty underside. But reality resists any tendency to parable. The figures are not typical, but remain individual. They accept that people might find them ridiculous. One – the one with the injured foot that won’t heal – sold the grandmother’s house for a great deal, but then on the way back – he was drunk, of course – he lost the bag with the money. And the neighbor suddenly bought a very expensive foreign car… Need for action. action consequence.
Yt, 2021 – directed by Stepan Burnashev, Dmitrii Davydov. Camera: Nikolai Petrov. Editing: Stepan Burnahev. Starring: Innokenty Lukovtsev, Sergei Balanov. Cine Global, 102 minutes. Theatrical release: December 15, 2022.