Koktebel (2003) Online

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

This movie really appealed to me. All of the characters are authentic and likable.

The main theme (what the movie is all about) is the terrible struggles and situations an alcoholic struggles with. One of the best scenes occurs when he runs out of vodka---so completely authentic.

It is an intelligent movie done by a director who makes visual points with just the right amount of emphasis to tie things together...look for the ladders and the umbrellas. The idea of flight... it is subtle and carefully thought out.

It is the story of an alcoholic aeronautical engineer and his 11 year old son who are penniless and trying to get to Crimea to live with a relative ---but there are so many levels...the place they are going to is a famous aeronautical gliding site. The father's career/life seems to have never taken off... you can read so many things into this movie.

It is the best one I have seen for a long long time.

The father is not your quintessential hobo; he's educated and sober, so when the hobo's son points to a bird in the sky, he can name the bird(a falcon), and explain why it can fly without a constant flapping of its wings(aerodynamics). According to the father, a former engineer in Moscow, an albatross is aerodynamically superior to a falcon: wing span matters. It helps the albatross glide in an airstream. The albatross lives by the sea. This spontaneous birdwatching incident portends of a lag in their long journey, as the roads to Koktebel will be bumpy roads, when the old man's demons return to circumnavigate the engineer(Igor Csernyevics) and his son(Gleb Puskeaplis) from their goal of reaching the seaside town in Crimea. The albatross is not only a seabird; it's also a byproduct of human frailty that greatly hinders accomplishment.

From the outset of the journey, in a scene aboard the train, the filmmaker privileges the boy in profile who stares at the ever-changing tableaux outside of the boxcar. Starting off at an objective distance, the stationery camera approaches the boy, until we're more intimate with the geography of his face. As the boy is being singled out for viewer sympathy, the filmmaker surreptitiously assigns blame towards the father, in due part to these found facial nuances effectuated by the maternal camera. Although the father refuses alcohol from their first benefactor near the train station, the college-educated widower reverts to full-blown alcoholism during their second major detour from the road, a tempestuous work/lodging arrangement with a drunken Stalin sympathizer. The optimism on the boy's face is a tell-tale sign of the two-fold journey(the geographical and the personal) that they're embarking on, in which the father's road to recovery encompasses the road to Koktebel.

Soon after being kicked off the train by a cordial provincial train conductor, the boy finds himself staring at an outhouse while the syncopation of electronic music emanates from a small boom-box hanging on a tree. This dialectic of aggressive music and the silent countryside is suggestive of futurism, in which contemporary life, as expressed by the relatively cacophonic sounds, provide an unlikely soundtrack to the pastoral setting. Futurism proclaimed that "a roaring car that seems to be driving under shrapnel is more beautiful than the Vixtory of Samothrace". When the teenaged girl emerges from the outhouse, the boy, later in the day, demonstrates his own brand of futurism(independent of the Italian and Russian movements) when he tells the girl, "I can see everything from above," and covers his eyes with a single hand as a prelude to his flair for astral-projection. In the next scene, we see a god's-eye view of the village. Like the evoking of an albatross, futurism has a dual meaning, too; the film invokes the savage power of the machine age, in which the boy has the power to glimpse the future.

Twice disappointed by his father(the drinking and the f******; the f***ee, a doctor who heals his gunshot wound at the hands of their former employer), the boy takes the road to Koktebel by himself. On a path, in the dark among the denuded trees and wild foilage, he puts another hand across his eyes, keeps it there, for a beat, then resumes his walking. Upon arriving in Koktebel, the symbolism of the birds reveals itself, as an albatross tries to steal the bread from out of the boy's possession while he sits alone on the lonely dock(the end of one, but not two journeys). He grabs the seabird by the neck, asserts control with a chokehold, before conceding to its beating wing and cry, and releases the avian machine to the sky. In the final scene, the viewer sees what was behind the boy's hand during his sojourn, another god's eye view, in which the father approaches, then sits down next to his son at the end of a pier. The meaning of this scene is unmistakable: the father, the albatross, has become the child; and the child, the father. The journey, the second journey, completes both men.

Mild spoilers.

Two figures, Dad and son, wending their way across the vast Russian hinterland is a powerful metaphor for the journey one makes during one's lifetime. The characters like the landscape, are simple, unpolished and real. Even the most exacting of directors would find little to complain of from the efforts of the uniformly able cast; unforced and memorable. The assortment of folk they meet along the way (eccentrics of one kind or another), do enough to nudge the film on; the batty, vodka-sodden character in need of a new roof offering the best contribution in my view (and effects the biggest impact of all upon their journey).

I would single out for special praise, the young lad (played by Gleb Puskepalis). For me, he succeeds in showing the premature transition his circumstances force him to make, from youthful innocence to adulthood; struggling with all that is brutal in our world: bereavement, betrayal, uncertainty, violence, isolation, hunger, poverty... The film offers us no reassurance that he has succeeded in coming to terms with or overcoming any of the above. Instead we learn that he is no longer the same boy; the boy obediently walking with a rucksack-eye-view behind his father, or the boy who earlier trustingly sat, accepting good humoured fatherly assistance in dealing with a worm in an apple.

The film, for me, can best be summed up by one of the simple meals partaken of by father and son: crude, straightforward and honest.

Good cinematography will only take you so far. However, amazing cinematography will carry your film by itself. And that's just the start...Acting is well above average, and the writing, although somewhat resembling the "Russian soul" in its mystique and lack of structure, nevertheless fulfills its duty: to get to the hearts of those who for some unknown reason would not find themselves enchanted by the visuals alone...

This film is slow, but slow like Herzog: each scene is visually fascinating and punctuated by a sense of dread that leads to real narrative suspense. I could not keep my eyes off the screen. The sense of reality in the rural Russian small towns is matched by a fresh magic realism that seems plausible while at the same time, as it should be, magical. Figures appear as if from fairy tales: a good witch, an ogre who turns out to be a benevolent troll. The film also captures the perspective of a child who insists on promises kept regardless of their impossibility and who takes refuge in self-created ritual. I will watch this many times.

Personally I didn't find the boy's acting particularly effective, especially in the scene when he has left his father behind. The brilliance of this film is that each scene clearly expresses an idea and the audience is able to understand and sympathize with emotions and events that would be hard to put into words. For me the landscape seemed oppressive and gloomy. Of course in some ways it's beautiful but that's only a perception, and if the audience enters into the spirit of the characters then i don't think they'd find the scenery attractive. I also found the drawn out shots demonstrated the immensity of everything, the length of the voyage, the effort that the characters have to make everyday just to keep going. The film is an amazing commentary on Russia, it revives a lot of the Communist culture (especially the belief in ESP) but also shows the new Russia in the form of the boy. A boy who is not a totally sympathetic character but who shows incredible determination.

I stumbled upon the DVD version of this film and, being a moderate fan of Russian cinema, made the time investment to watch it.

The film was slow, and some takes were, in my opinion, unnecessarily long. The hand-held, back-and-forth capture of the boy throwing stones at a heap of junk strained my eyes, and I found it annoying and unnecessary.

However, the film also has the typical merits of a low-budget, personal film which does have a story to tell. The acting was fine, the story simple and yet believable, and the shots were visually pleasing.

This is by no means a great film, but I will recommend it to anyone who is fond of Russian cinema, and has the patience and a desire to have glimpses of modern Russia.

A pleasant enough road movie, about a divorced (or widowed, I don't remember) man going with his young son from Moscow to the Crimea. He's an aeronautical engineer who has been fired and has hit the bad times (maybe with the recovery of Russia's economy under Putin, the argument is slightly out of date). We see them traveling through the countryside in a dilapidated train, and then through the bad roads of Western Russia and Eastern Ukraine. Nothing much happens, but before reaching the Black Sea they stop at small towns, where they offer to repair the roof to a house where a mean old man lives, meet a pretty young doctor, etc. Some reviews I read wrote about the pair traveling through the desolate steppes of the former Soviet Union, yet this is some of the most fertile and densely populated part of that country. The pace of the film is slow, though not terribly so, compared with traditional Russian cinema, and the characters seem real even if the plot is slightly far-fetched. Recommended.

Koktebel is a very poor film made by obviously inexperienced directors. It centres on a father and son as they make their way from Moscow to the Crimea. Without money, they have to hitch lifts, get work when they can and rely on others' generosity. The film has enormous potential that is almost completely wasted by the directors. The cinematography (which clearly could make a film like this wonderful) is bad. The directors take the 'banale detail' camera-work to a new level in a clear imitation of better Russian directors (like Tarkovsky or Sokhurov), but carry it off badly, so that it becomes boring and sentimental. This is a real shame, since the Russian landscape is exceptionally beautiful in its sparseness and this is hardly captured at all. The directors are probably trying to show the the point of view of the 11-year-old protagonist, but it results in a pretentious and cloying film. Neither the script nor the acting are so bad, but the directors make unfair demands on the child actor playing the son, spoiling what would have otherwise been a solid performance. There are occasional good scenes, but the narrative lacks continuity and is horribly self-conscious (social stereotypes appear from the wings, making it seem like the directors have a tick-list of emotions they want to convey). The continual use of music (not a bad, but an inappropriate piece by Chick Corea) compounds the sentimentality of the film. Avoid it.

Koktebel' is the film that could impress those who love Russia, Russians and who wants to know more about that country. It could help to understand "mysterious Russian soul". But it is sometimes too slow and detailed. It got the Silver Georgy on the 25th Moscow International Film festival.

MILD SPOILERS

Roads to Koktebel is the story of a father and his son who travel to Koktobel in the Crimean region after a tragedy in their family. As they travel from place to place they meet many people and learn how to survive through their journey.

I was expecting so much more from this film as there have been quite a lot of good reviews for the said film. Unfortunately I found the basic pacing of the film very slow and some of the scenes really were dragging and seemed disjointed.

The story was ordinary which I think contributed to the nature of the film. The theme of fatherhood and family is always a good platform to make a good story. However the writers were unable to do that.

I liked the performances of the actors especially the young son who was pretty good. It's a shame that the material I felt was too poor and all of his good work went down the drain.