SYNOPSICS
Koktebel (2003) is a Russian movie. Boris Khlebnikov,Alexei Popogrebsky has directed this movie. Gleb Puskepalis,Igor Chernevich,Evgeniy Sytyy,Vera Sandrykina are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2003. Koktebel (2003) is considered one of the best Adventure,Drama,Romance movie in India and around the world.
A widowed aeronautics engineer, who has lost his job, travels with his son hopping freight trains from Moscow to Koktebel, a town by the Black Sea, to start a new life with the father's sister. After they are stopped by a train guard, they continue their travel on foot. The father battles against his alcohol addiction and the son is fascinated with the idea of flight. One rainy day an old man accepts them in his house in return for the repair of the roof. The father gives in to the alcohol offered by the old man, who in a drunken brawl accuses him of stealing money and shoots him. A young female village doctor takes care of him and a romantic relationship between the two ensues. The father feels reluctant to continue the journey. The son leaves alone and a truck driver gives him a ride to Koktebel. However, his aunt has left for the summer.
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Koktebel (2003) Reviews
Visually breathtaking
Koktabel follows the progress of a penniless father and son from some undefined point in Russia to a Black-Sea resort in the Crimea. From my point of view, the story and its characters are primarily vehicles for the stunning images, which ultimately steal the show. But that's not to take anything away from a well-acted story with some very tense and some very funny moments. Here are a few of the most memorable pictures which stayed with me long after watching the film: 1) A red and white parasol on an empty pebble beach at night, twitching like a living thing, waves breaking, perfectly black water; 2) A close-up of a girl's hair roots, a cash register and a cashier's voice audible from beyond; 3) A solitary wooden toilet shack outside a wood with a cheap stereo hanging from a neighbouring tree branch, little red lights on the speakers flashing like eyes as the camera approaches, the music gets louder; 4) Objects flashing into view for split seconds between stretches of darkness, as seen through the lens of an old camera. Between the geometric shapes of the opening and closing shots (a tunnel in a hill and a bird's-eye view of a landing pier respectively), almost every scene provides an earthy, harmonious, visual gem, each worthy of admiration in its own right. The clearest recurring theme in the film is flying. One of the first lines is the father's weary joke "we'll go by plane" (wrongly subtitled as "we'll fly") he's a former plane engineer. Fed on his talk of butterflies and birds and hang-gliders, his son has his own dreams of flight, which recur as an albatross in an illustrated book, as rusty sheets of metal gliding from a roof, as sheets of paper being launched from a hilltop (the motionless camera leaves us to wonder how far the last one does actually fly), with the boy's gift of being able to visualise a landscape from a great height (filmmakers can have poetic licence too), and with the film's closing bird's-eye shot. To me this flying metaphor can be extended beyond it's obvious application to the boy (living in poverty but abounding in curiosity, imagination, and daydreams), to the lowly cast of the film, left behind by the new Russia (and Ukraine), and to the economic backwaters they live in. Whether or not the characters themselves dream of flying, the filmmaker, dwelling lovingly on the things that surround them (apple trees, a storm, a washing line) elevates them to a work of art, and does their dreaming for them. I couldn't fail to deeply admire this film, but I don't expect anyone to share my very personal take on it in its measured, pensive, quiet voice, Koktabel shows us the former USSR from an angle which brings out those same qualities that impressed me in my first experiences of the place. Not the glitz and kitsch and squalour of its largest cities, but its vast expanses (expressed in the film through fields, roads, and rail tracks), the uniqueness of Russian minutiae (a soviet-manufactured metal tub, an old-fashioned box of cigarettes, standard cheap wallpaper and clock in a house, the bustle in a tourist market), and above all, vibrancy amidst decay.
Road To Utopia
This is doing the Russian Tourist Board no favors at all, portraying as it does a seemingly endless drab landscape punctuated by decaying buildings both domestic and commercial and populated by equally drab eccentrics. To call it slow-paced would be to call sloths sprinters but that is not necessarily a deficit. 90 per cent of the shots begin as Extra Wide taking in all the colorless terrain and occasionally introducing movement via people and, even more occasionally, traffic. Although shot in color the landscape remains resolutely grey. There's also a penchant for holding a shot for long moments after the characters have exited and in this it resembles Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Nevertheless we find ourselves watching the father and son as they make their very slow way to the Crimea having, we are told, started from Moscow. Along the way we learn, or discover, that the father is a recovering alcoholic and that the Koktebel to which he is taking his son no longer exists, at least not under that name, a metaphor for lives that must change or disappear. The film has to be carried by the two principals but there is decent support from a railway worker, a teenage girl, a householder and a doctor with no patients. It's not going to make a fortune but films like this deserve to be seen as a counterpoint to the formulaic.
This is NOT Disney (thank God).
A film like this just couldn't be made in America, where action must occur at a slam-bang pace, and children must be either pitifully ignorant of life or else caricatures of evil. Here, there is exquisite attention to detail -- a countryside, a vase of flowers, and long periods with no dialog at all where a mood is simply allowed to develop. The passage of time may not be in equivalent "real time," yet it passes noticeably. And what a skilled performance by Gleb Puskepalis, a boy with, as often seems to be the case, a distinguished acting history in legitimate theater. His character is master of his fate and of the plot, and he himself is master of the camera and the cast. I like this film especially because it is the boy who is rational, determined and self-directed, while the adults, as in reality, are continually made fools by their alcohol, aggression, and just wanting "to f*** each other" all the time. Bravo!
Very calm and very real film.
One should be in a relaxed mood when going to see this film. Be there to tranquilly cherish the moments of life and the film will open itself and offer you all its hidden prizes. Someone mentioned the landscapes are bleak... The film is isomorphic to its landscapes. Bleak and lovely at the same time. Little bit depressing for those who choose to stay at a distance, to look at (film or landscapes) as at exhibits. For those who step in, it becomes precious in its touching ugliness. As you enter, ugliness is redefined. We are able to adore and love what we thought ugly before when we lived in the world bombarded by artificially selected beauty. We appreciate the naturality, the simple yet awkward reality of landscapes, of characters and of situations. The directing and actors are both excellent and succeed to achieve this reality so difficult to balance on screen! There isn't more talk than necessary, more expression of emotions or velocity of thought than a real living person would allow - not any of the tricks directors have to use to keep us interested. Yet the film is not boring. Because we can feel and understand the characters on screen as fully as we can a human being next to us! We can recognize little parts from the happening in the memories of our own life. Memories otherwise we'd never pay attention to.
A thoroughly Russian Mystery
I have just seen this film at the Renoir in London, and found much to enjoy. At first the basic story-line of the father looking for a haven and the boy for a world of adventure and freedom, seemed slow-moving but the early long takes gave the viewer time to absorb the landscape and the point-of-view, in particular the boy's slow awakening to the reality of his situation. His ability to 'see everything from above', demonstrated to the forest-dwelling girl early in the film when he drew a map of a terrain unknown to him, was an early signal of his superior grasp of reality and an introduction to the main metaphorical cluster of the film. The use of birds, glider and flying-paper imagery rang the changes on the visual representation of the boy's yearnings; a galaxy of Dostoyevsian larger-than-life and twice-as-unpredictable Russian characters met along the way added intrigue and ethnic authenticity to the story-line. The bizarre minor characters contrasted with the down-to-earth ordinariness of the tensions between the father and son. Their habitats were astonishing and yet completely acceptable within the heightened realism established in the early scenes - the railworker's shed with the lavatory doubling as a vodka store - the tumble-down mansion whose roof the father stayed to repair with disastrous consequences, the hillside ox-roast with flying sparks visible for miles and a suddenly-looming lorry-driver big as Brian Blessed hefting the boy across his shoulders with a triumphant cry of 'Meat! and a chill echo of 'Texas Chain Saw '.The Amazonian, silent 'Xenia', for all her 'sweatiness' complained of by the boy, was given a similarly apocryphal persona. All were separated by muddy fields and clawing shrubland which the camera allowed us to experience as visually alienating at a distance and unbearably uncomfortable up close. Questions raised were as much about Russian geography and history as about the central relationship and its outcome. By the end, the mention of 'Koktebel', whose very absence from the atlas referred to a historical shift in identity, carried the resonance of Chekhov's 'Moscow', in his masterpiece about longing and nostalgia, 'Three Sisters'. At the end of the film, when the uncertain pleasures of routine existence versus an ungraspable freedom had been clearly delineated, the binding ties of father and son remained as unresolved and problematic as at the beginning. Like the evenly-matched wrestlers in the hillside firelight, they were forced to declare an uneasy truce.