A Stoker (2010)

 

a.k.a. The Stoker

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov

Cast: Mikhail Skryabin as Kochegar; Yuriy Matveev as Vassily 'Bizon'; Aleksandr Mosin as the Sergeant; Aida Tumutova as Sasha; Anna Korotayeva as Masha; Varvara Belokurova as Vera

Canon Fodder

 

[Some Major Spoilers]

There is in the centre of this film a stoker (Mikhail Skryabin) who sets up the fires for Russian mafia to dispose of unwanted bodies into at a furnace. Writing a novel on a typewriter in-between working at the furnaces, the stoker continues his days working between his real job, with the burning of coal, and intermittent visits from the mafia. Out of the later Aleksey Balabanov films, A/The Stoker became for me one of the strongest as, even if a pessimistic film at heart, the humanity it still there intermingled with the nihilism of Balabanov.

A Stoker's entire plot is a petty dispute, a romantic triangle between his daughter Sasha (Aida Tumutova) and the daughter of a mobster, Masha (Anna Korotayeva), over one of the latter's goons, leading a disposal within the furnaces that the stoker himself will react to. Though complicit in helping to dispose bodies, he is still arguably an innocent living in his own world until that moment and the path he goes onto in response. Notably, without being directly part of the narrative, the stoker and his daughter Sasha are of Yakut descent, continuing Balabanov's fascinating and admirable trait from The River (2002) of working with Yakut actors as the leads, not presented as different from anyone else but with their own stories and only keeping this in mind to that back story, in this case following an older man who was a former soldier. He has not been paid over two months at his work when we first encounter him, and the mafia using the furnaces at his workplace for other illegal purposes is more of a way to support himself, living there with a bed nearby, in mind to this. This does not even have the exaggeration of Dead Man's Bluff (2005) here when dealing with its crime plot threads, as the banality and ultimately pointless nature of hiring hit men to kill people, and the required disposal of bodies in the stoker's furnaces, is a system we witness throughout this shorter film's novella-like narrative.

A Stoker, steeped in pessimism, is humane nonetheless in reducing all these gangster tropes into pettiness. The banality is found in one hit man having to get his sum for the work from a dingy safe, watched by a man watching porn, in the room near a downstairs bar. The mafia boss who uses our lead knows him and served under him as a sniper when the stoker was part of the military during the Afghan-Soviet War of the eighties, friendly with him only to transgress this when his daughter, out of selfishness, makes an ill-fated decision with a real tragedy. The mafia boss himself is a man comfortable in his own life with an adult daughter, living in his middle age in a well off middle class home, only with this side of working in the criminal underground nowadays, his involvement entirely from an adult daughter whose lack of moral consequences will be traumatising for her and doomed for him.  Marsha, before she betrays Sasha, have a business in a fur store with her, financed by her own father, and even the man they are unwittingly sharing is one of her father's own contract killers, Vassily 'Bizon' (Yuriy Matveev), a mostly mute and silent figure who feels less like a figure cheating behind each of their backs but casually drifting between their arms.

Nothing is over-the-top or passionate. Only the stoker's finale decision has a weight beyond the banal world, one willing to self sacrifice as he dons his old military uniform again. Beyond this, set in the brown and grey industrial and urban world of Russia, the only things of passion here are the rock songs on the soundtrack, a trademark of Aleksey Balabanov that have a profound influence, and how compared to the other films how explicitly sexual the film is. With the two female leads Aida Tumutova and Anna Korotayeva comfortable in doing full nudity, the presence of such casual eroticism, amidst the bland wallpapered rooms and snow covered exteriors, feels less lurid softcore but the eroticism of paintings in how they are depicted. Rather than destructive, they are scenes and interactions with Vassily, the male and female bodies eroticised, with emotions beyond the world even if corporal physical interactions. Sadly, even this is undercut by the fact, once one realises Vassily is being shared between them, the passions they unwittingly share with the same man separately will crush and traumatise many when a body count is created.

As jealously, a petty one with an additional layer for greed, causes pointless death, eventually the stoker himself will act differently, a revenge that is as casually done as it is also unexpected, including by precise use of a ski pole's tip from someone who uses it like a soldier able to use anything would. A Stoker is a bleak farce within its heart, one where you can however still see Aleksey Balabanov possess some semblance of hope even if he dashes it in his characters' fates here. It is hopeful in that there is moments of lightness amidst all this. One legitimate innocent is here, Vera the child (Varvara Belokurova) who visits the stoker continually, even to the point her father visits to see if he is on the level, and admires him from their one interaction. She is the one who will preserve the stoker's unfinished novel, a folktale of an outsider being welcomes into a Yakut home, in an unknown past, only to commit transgressions including raping the wife which will not be left unpunished.

Alongside the ending having this child tell the story, which is clearly done as a jarring choice, Balabanov reflecting his past work, including his use of early cinema, tells this story-within-a-story as a monochrome narrative too. This tale-within-a-tale's moral complexity in itself, the discomforting morality of the director's own films, does not with other films of his come perilously close to being tasteless, even if it involves the wife being punished too by the husband and wishing for it like a pleasure in itself, but becomes elusive and adds a strange discomfort to the entire work we have witnessed. A lot can be gained from Aleksey Balabanov's films in general, even if you do find yourself in uncomfortable territory, and in this case, A Stoker in both its simplicity and when it does not go forth in a clearly meant way are all compelling. In terms of character studies, it is one of the most empathetic even in terms of characters whose deeds are not defendable, all within a tale where everyone, painfully, makes decisions which they let themselves fall into. As a result, as already mentioned, this was one of the strongest of the director-writer's career for me in general because of this attitude.