For his new film, Limonov, la ballade, in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival 2024, Kirill Serebrennikov has set about recounting the life and work ofEduard Limonov, adapting the book Limonov, by Emmanuel Carrère - who appears as a wink, incidentally, in a short scene. In this chronological biopic recounting his story from the early '70s to his death in 2020, the film's irritating focus on inconsequential details dilutes thepolitical aspect of the man and his struggles for the better half of the film.
Limonov, la ballade will be shown in cinemas from December 4, 2024.
Synopsis: At once militant, revolutionary, dandy, rogue, butler and homeless, he was an enraged and bellicose poet, a political agitator and the novelist of his own greatness. The life of Eduard Limonov, like a trail of sulfur, is a journey through the turbulent streets of Moscow and the skyscrapers of New York, from the back alleys of Paris to the heart of the gaols of Siberia during the second half of the 20th century.
" Neither a dissident nor a soviet," he corrects when asked to define himself. Limonov has had a thousand lives: factory worker, butler, homeless man, poet, successful writer, agitator and then, late in life, founder of the National-Bolshevik Party, rightly decried for its positions on theextreme right of the political spectrum. But Serebrennikov prefers to waste time (or gain it?) by detailing instead the couple formed by the writer and a young model, who have endless sex with each other, without any narrative interest.
At length, the Russian director paints a portrait of a man who is radical and excessive in many respects, sometimes violent (he renames himself Limonov after the Russian word for grenade), inglorious yetextremely egocentric (he sometimes talks about himself in the third person), constantly provocative (healthy or otherwise). While Ben Whishaw gives a true performance as this multiple character, we've known Serebrennikov to be more inspired and attentive to his subject.
It's when the film finally tacklesLimonov's political involvement, during thecollapse of the Soviet Empire, that it becomes interesting and moves away from the rather mundane depiction of a simple Russian punk enjoying all the pleasures the West has to offer, to the lively - if not cutting-edge - soundtrack of the Velvet Underground. After Kharkiv, New York and Paris, he returned to Putin's Russia, where, in 2001, he was sent to a colony in Siberia, where he stayed for several years.
But here again, while Serebrennikov doesn't spare him and highlights his dubious st ances (on the fall of the Berlin Wall, among others), the filmmaker is careful not to go into the details of his political party, which is considered red-brown, and it's not until the very end of the film that we catch a glimpse of a critical eye.
Not to mention a minor detail: how is it possible that the biopic of a man who fought against American imperialism should be filmed in English? Even when, in 1989, Limonov is reunited with his parents, two peasants from the Russian countryside who speak perfect English. Despite its restless, creative direction and Ben Whishaw's performance, Limonov, the Ballad is a work that lacks integrity.
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