Morphine (2008)

 

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Sergey Bodrov

Based on the short stories by Mikhail A. Bulgakov

Cast: Leonid Bichevin as Doktor Mikhail Polyakov; Ingeborga Dapkunaite as Anna Nikolayevna; Andrey Panin as Feldsher Anatoliy Lukich; Svetlana Pismichenko as Pelageya Ivanovna; Katarina Radivojevic as Ekaterina Karlovna; Yuri Gertsman as Gorenburg; Aleksandr Mosin as Vlas; Irina Rakshina as Aksinya; Sergey Garmash as Vasiliy Osipovich

Canon Fodder

 

Based on the autobiographical short stories of Mikhail A. Bulgakov, A Young Doctor's Notebook which he wrote between 1925-26, the source material which Morphine adapts drew upon the author's experiences as a newly graduated doctor in 1916 to 1918, practicing in the small village hospital of Smolensk Governorate, an experience as replicated by his stand-in Doktor Mikhail Polyakov (Leonid Bichevin) which included an addiction to morphine. Bulgakov is someone I am familiar with through The Master and Margarita (1966-67), a masterpiece in terms of literature, a figure who, in mind to this being set within 1917, when the October Revolution looms over the narrative of Morphine, would have his work censored by the Soviet state, with even The Master and Margarita, a novel he started writing in 1928, only being published in 1966, decades after his passing. Morphine is still a Bulgakov film though too, set during the period of the October Revolution, up to the time the country of Russia would be changed drastically in the 20th century, where Mikhail the doctor has to still work within an isolated community in the countryside.

This is a time when medicine is in a primitive form, where an autopsy is only allowed if you ask for it, and even then, could be considered sacrilege even in 1917. The title is literal - "the first injection", as a chapter intertitle states, comes from an anti-diphtheria serum which Mikhail is allergic to, leading to his nurse Anna Nikolayevna (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) having to inject him with a morphine shot to overcome the pain from this. In the middle of icy nowhere, as the Revolution beckons, in a small medical station, life for Mikhail is with a great lack of confidence as a doctor, one who still needs to consult his medical text books to complete a woman giving birth even if he succeeds entirely in the goal, as he does with a tracheotomy for a young girl.  Even that later task is under the strife of the girl's grandmother trying to refuse the surgery taking place, as if a taboo. This is a time as well, alongside ether needing to be used as anaesthesia, customs exist like lining a pregnant woman's vagina with sugar to tempt a baby out, leaving Mikhail in a position with many obstacles. From the lack of adequate anaesthesia to having to rely on only a nurse and a fellow doctor, which could prove an issue if they fall unconscious mid-surgery, his is a stressful position, and the accident of having his first morphine shot becomes an overbearing desire to just have them to avoid the cold turkey state.

Worse is when an amputation when required, due to destroying a limb in a breaker for flax with one female patient, is likely to lead to death. One of the more ornate films Aleksey Balabanov, in terms of a period drama, you are however thrust into his usual tone in that this is the scene where the prosthetic effects are fully on display, nasty but in mind to realism of what these scenarios would look like. Some of the tales Morphine adapts are of another time period, where one hazard for anyone let alone a doctor in 1910s Russia is being chased by wolves in the middle of nowhere, at night, on your horse drawn sled. Not much changed though in how busy and hectic medicine is as Morphine's tales, and Mikhail's strain attests to this chaos also being timeless, struggling against what resources are available and, whether one would like to admit this or not, also members of the public who are treated, the balancing board between the Hippocratic Oath and the need to help anyone with full kindness having to negotiate around how a patient or their family can act, even in ways potentially destructive to their well being in petty ways.

Only one aspect of Morphine jars as an issue, and it is unfortunately another layer to how the director-writer skirted problematic content in his films. In this case how a Jewish doctor is the issue, one Mikhail butts head with for morphine, dwindling in availability as supplies are fewer and far between in the midst of war, and a figure who eventually becomes a villain who takes advantage of the new regime to have some power. There is some explicit anti-Semitism from Mikhail at one point, when he goes to the town of Uglich for kicking the morphine addiction in a psychological ward, even if contextually that scene is to provoke anti-Semitic soldiers, with a slur, to attack to the psychological hospital and distract whilst he escapes with some of their morphine stock. It is the one aspect which undercuts Morphine, which is a bleak work which yet stands out from Balabanov on a tight rope between its sombreness and bleak humour, another of those complexities with the Russian director in what is intentionally a provocation, whether justifiable to have, and what is just undefendable.

Aside from this, and it is a tiny part of the entirely production, Morphine could be seen as one of Balabanov's more "conventional" films if it did not have streaks of his more melancholic and nihilistic touches, alongside arguably more humanity than the content may suggest. Humanity is there in that, barring one moment talked of in the paragraph before, and that he does kill someone in defence, Mikhail is the closest to a good person in the director's world, one who is not irredeemable but just wears the costume of a gangster or someone "cool", instead an innocent who desires to help people as a doctor and, sadly, has his worse aspects revealed under the spell of the morphine addiction. Alongside their burgeoning romance, Anna is also a sympathetic figure, even willingly becoming an addict to know why he is, her guilt in having given Mikhail the first morphine injection influence this choice. Morphine as well, befitting Balabanov, has a lot of twisted humour within itself even it is paints a gristly image of the Revolution and the rise of Communism.

There is a joke about Mikhail getting caught trying to take a shot in a gentleman's bathroom, or grotesqueness when, mid-oral sex, as Mikhail is having another relationship with a mistress of a man of power, morphine related nausea and vomiting undercuts any chance for pleasure he can feel.  It neither feels exploitative either, but continuing Balabanov's style from before if, arguably, with a greater sense of sombreness. The sense of this is found that, finding himself succumbing more and more to the titular drug, as Russia is turned upside, Mikhail unlike other protagonists in the director's films has no chance of crawling into power, an outsider simply because he is, truthfully, one of the few with an innocence, if tragically one who is being chewed alive by the drug addiction. [Major Plot Spoiler] Mikhail A. Bulgakov lived as an author, even as a suppressed one, until 1940, becoming as revered around the world as he is in his homeland of Russia. Mikhail in Morphine, within a film theatre laughing at a comedy, continuing Balabanov's fascination with early cinema, pulls a gun on himself and ends his life in the midst of this brief semblance of happiness. Breaking from history, he becomes an Aleksey Balabanov character in the world weary bleakness this ending represents. [Spoiler Ends]

Morphine is a fascinating film, touched by Balabanov's earlier films like The Castle (1994) and Of Freaks and Men (1998), especially in the sense of humour. But it also feels older in terms of the air being more sombre, touched by the populist success of the crime films of his in moving away from overt artificiality for a more realistic period setting. It is a rewarding film from Balabanov's films like many others, and as the one that is closest to an accessible film, only to undercut it with his tone, Morphine does stake out its place with worth.