Ethno is not a film – Newspaper Kommersant No. 16 (7461) dated 01/28/2023

The mystical road movie by Lyubov Borisova “Don’t Bury Me Without Ivan” was released. A journey through Yakutia in 1910 by a lethargic peasant Stepan Beresekov and an artist-ethnographer-photographer Ivan Popov caused Mikhail Trofimenkov a whole gamut of feelings: from tenderness to irritation.

Stepan (Alexander Chichakhov) went on an ethnographic expedition with Ivan Popov (Daryus Gumauskas), a real cultural hero of Yakutia, fearing that he would eventually be buried alive. And then he fell asleep in his native village once, twice, a third. Finally – and what to do with him: the pulse is not palpable, the body is icy – he woke up in a coffin, frightening the psalmist, Stepan was already buried. Another thing is that it is on the expedition that he will have to go through the experience of a real burial through the fault of the royal satraps, but everything will work out.

And how can something bad happen to such a sweetheart as the ever-smiling Stepan. The soul is a person in the literal sense of the word. As the terrible and beautiful shaman will explain, his fontanel on the crown of his head has not overgrown, and through this fontanel, during a lethargic sleep, the soul breaks out. And this happens from the contemplation by Stepan of something incredibly beautiful. From the play of colors in the dawn sky to Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna Litta, a color reproduction of which – let’s consider this an explanation of Lyubov Borisova’s love for the aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky – will somehow miraculously end up in a Yakut hut. A sort of “Stendhal syndrome”.

If Stepan saw the film “Don’t Bury Me Without Ivan”, he would inevitably fall into such a lethargic dream, from which it would not be a fact that he came out at all. In a sense, Borisova’s film is the antithesis of Alexei Balabanov’s unfinished, terrible masterpiece The River (2002). An episode of Ivan and Stepan’s meeting with a girl who had been ill with leprosy and lived in the forest for three years, eating almost nothing but berries, can be considered an openly anti-Balaban retort. Nothing, not even very thin, and if you wash and change clothes a little, then at least now for a beauty contest. Ivan, it turns out, also had leprosy, and this – remember Balabanov’s nightmares – is not at all scary.

The shaman, with all her mystical omnipotence, resembles the soloist of an excellent folklore ensemble. Wise old women tell – and Ivan, you know, writes down in a notebook – beautiful tales about catching silver vendace. The gray-bearded priest, the father of Ivan and that very frightened psalmist, fits perfectly into the fresco on the wall of his small temple. Folk craftsmen, after a bit of wandering, still give Ivan masterpieces of arts and crafts, which will replenish the collections of the Russian Museum.

Even the obvious murderers, locked up with Ivan in prison, are ready to provide him with an alibi: there are no bad people on the screen. Well, with the exception of the gendarmes, who thoughtlessly accused Ivan of killing Stepan, but they can be understood: how do they know about lethargy. There is also a strange bunch of nihilists who tried to ridicule the shaman, but it would be better if they did not do this.

All this grace is accompanied by unobtrusive and, as it were, metaphysical disputes. Yes, not even disputes, but so, through theses. Like: the church says that there is no death, but the science of the existence of the soul has not been proven. Or: the Yakut has three souls, and Stepan is a kind of avatar of the gospel Lazarus.

Yakut cinema has long had nothing to prove to anyone. An amazing phenomenon has already established itself on the world cinema scene. But, as Borisova’s film testifies above all, he is threatened with the trap of ethnographic narcissism: here, too, the struggle with Balabanov’s ghost is indeed inevitable and relevant. The director herself says that she demanded that the film crew make everything “a little more beautiful” than it should be. Because, they say, we see what is happening through the eyes of the ethnographer Ivan. The thesis, to put it mildly, is controversial. The action can and, for example, should be seen through the eyes of one of the heroes, but in his human, and not professional, incarnation. Otherwise, the film should be immediately exhibited in an ethnographic museum, and not released on screens.