‘Silent Souls’ opens at the Siskel Film Center on Friday, December 9th.
The various religious, cultural, and social rituals that are employed when loved ones pass away have always been a rich resource for artists, cultural historians and anthropologists. When viewed objectively, what do they say about the quality of the life being mourned? How do these symbols, structures and rites instruct us how to live our own lives, or face our own inevitable deaths, or enable us to put the loss of a particular person within a larger context? Or is it OK to just view it as a personal loss – how is how we ourselves grieve, individually, anyone else’s business? Why don’t we ourselves assess our own loss, and choose for ourselves who we will lean on, who we will share our loss with, if we choose to share it at all? Explorations of those boundaries, between objective communal grief and subjective personal loss, have been at the heart of countless works of film, theater and literature; from family sagas to geographical histories to biographies to comedies to spy thrillers; the ripples of a single death circle out across generations and histories, or a passing simply happens, unobserved, like a single candle wick that has exhausted itself.
The death in Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls (Ovsyanki, the original Russian title meaning The Bunting Birds) (Russia, 2010) is that of Tanya, the beloved wife of Miron (Yuriy Tsurilo) a man who runs a paper mill in the small rural town of Neya. She has passed away in their home the night before, and Miron enlists the help of their mutual friend Aist (Igor Sergeev) to prepare her body for the funereal rite. ("I'm not taking her to the morgue...I'd prefer to do everything with you.") They all live in a region of northwestern Russia, cut through with rivers and the fishing villages thereof, that has slowly intertwined the cultural elements of ancient tribal Finland and western Siberia with modern Russia. Miron and Aist descend from old families in the region, referred to as Merjans, and have an intrinsic understanding of what’s involved in the traditional ritual celebrations of birth, marriage, and death.
The tone of the film is astonishing – it’s quiet and reverent, as you might imagine it to be, but as the film proceeds, we learn of the naturalistic, almost pagan, simplicity of the Merjan way of life. As the director himself describes it, “For the Merjans, there are no gods – only Love and Water.” The body is to be cremated along the shore of the river, and the ashes distributed into the water. So we follow these two men in the preparations, on the journey, and at the funeral. I don’t want to rob you of your own discovery of the details of the Merjan worldview, or the natures of the two characters relating it, but it’s important to tell you that the story is handled with a tenderness, a delicacy and a generosity that I’ve rarely encountered in a film before. Watching these two very modest men perform their urgent but solemn mission, informed by a tastefully sparing series of flashbacks, is a surprisingly enriching and engaging experience. The generosity of tone, and the confidently gorgeous visuals, brought to my mind the equally rich and delicately complex films of Lee Chang-dong, the Korean filmmaker who brought us ‘Secret Sunshine’ and ‘Poetry.’ But there’s also a touch of the elegiac tone of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone as well, and the (perhaps futile) struggle of inherently moral men to preserve a set of values and ethics that are disappearing in the face of modern, homogenizing ‘progress.’
I’m obviously recommending this excellent film, and, as always with a film this good, recommending you get out to the actual theater to experience it. This film easily makes my top ten this year. ‘It’s a sad and a beautiful world,’ intoned Roberto Benigni in ‘Down By Law,’ and this beautiful film goes in the evidentiary casebook as further proof.
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