In 1971, French filmmaker Jacques Rivette made a 13-hour opus called Out 1. Its extended runtime was necessary to encompass the full sweep of an unstable political era, where the hope and energy from the 1968 student revolution gradually dissipated into something resembling paranoia and melancholy. The breathtaking new feature documentary from the Russian-American filmmaker Julia Loktev, My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, runs to a paltry-by-comparison five and a half hours, yet still manages to capture the slow-shifting tectonic plates of geopolitical history in its jerky vérité camerawork.
The filmmaker pounces on the urgent subject of so-called press freedoms in Russia in the period directly before and after Vladimir Putin’s announcement in 2022 of a “special military operation” in Ukraine. Our central thread in the film’s first half is the charismatic ball of maternal exasperation, Anna Nemzer, a host at the independent progressive news station TV Rain who cares deeply for her flock of impassioned agitators. We watch in disbelief at the hoops a journalist must jump through in order to air criticism directed at the Russian government, which include labelling oneself as a “foreign agent” prior to any dispatch and yielding to a Kafka-esque maze of superfluous bureaucracy.
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What comes across quite quickly is that Nemzer and her ilk are the true patriots of Russia – and they know it. They’re the ones who love their country and see the vast, untapped potential of its populace. Yet Putin has transformed the place into a wintry annex of North Korea, constantly making speeches about the importance of press freedom in his sham liberal democracy while taking great pains to crush dissent in all forms. With this film, Loktev wants to give a view from the ground, allowing scenes to play out at length so as to really transmit the idea that, for her subjects, the potential horrors of this situation haunt their every waking moment. One journalist is seen with a half-read copy of the Chris Kraus novel ‘I Love Dick’ and comments that she can’t comprehend how people could have time for all these love affairs.
Yet what’s surprising about the film is how hopeful it is, zeroing in on human creativity and resilience during the worst of times rather than wallowing in abject misery. In the film’s third chapter, just prior to the invasion, there are new year’s celebrations where people are invited to share a piece of good news (no easy task!). Indeed, considering the gravity of things, it’s remarkable that (by my count) there’s only one shot of a person crying in the entire film. A moving final chapter sees our plucky gang forced to accept the inevitable – that if they want to keep fighting the good fight for a free and open Russia, then they’ll have to do so from elsewhere. Loktev will continue their saga in My Undesirable Friends: Part 2 – Exile.