Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in Chicago, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
4 (2004)
Director: Ilya Khrzanovsky
Movie review
From Time Out London
Two guys and a girl walk into a spookily depopulated Moscow bar. Oleg says he delivers mineral water to the Kremlin, Marina claims to be in advertising, and Vladimir – the one with the most detailed and unreliable story to tell – is in genetic engineering, or so he says, and after a couple of drinks, he’ll tell you all about a cloning project that Russia has pursued for half a century. But wait, isn’t human cloning banned? His deadpan reply: ‘You forget what country we’re living in.’ Though director Ilya Khrzhanovsky denies that his synopsis-proof first feature is a product of the Russian necrorealist movement – self-consciously inflammatory underground art, film and video that symbolises (or feasts upon) the putrefying corpse of the Soviet state – the startling ‘4’ is nonetheless a howling orgy of decrepitude and decay. In a gait sometimes reminiscent of Béla Tarr on angel dust, the film traipses from an assaultive opener (suffice to say that dogs do not fare well here) to its centrepiece pub scene (26 minutes long!) to rustling industrialised wastelands (overlaid with rattling ambient soundscapes) and into some deep, damp woods, where Marina meets a formidable band of toothless crones writhing in the throes of a hysterical mourning party for her sister, Zoya. In this wet, wailing forest, Vladimir’s wild tales of quadruplicate villagers suddenly seem perfectly plausible, and Khrzhanovsky’s visceral, arrhythmic critique spins into overdrive, fuelled by grief, rage and surging oceans of vodka. Decidedly not for everyone, ‘4’ is an incomparably unhinged act of disinterment, but it’s also a fiercely willed feat of rebirth, raw and bloody and screamingly alive.Author: JWin
Time Out London Issue 1831: September 21-28 2005
Cast & crew
Director: Ilya Khrzanovsky
Producer: Igor Malakhov
Cast: Shavkat Abdusalamov, Yuri Laguta, Konstantin Murzenko, Alexei Khvostenko, Anatoli Adoskin, Yelena Yatsura full cast
Genre(s): Drama
Duration: 126 mins
Most popular on this site
Features
Gray's anatomy
James Gray wants to push buttons—again.
The next big thing?
Gigantic Releasing tries to rethink indie distribution…without movie theaters.
Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova, First Lady of Soviet Cinema
So you think you can dance, comrade?
Puppet master
Coraline director Henry Selick takes stop-motion animation into 3-D.
Socratic method
Laurent Cantet's approach on the set matches the message of his film.
Wander woman
Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy puts a Bush-era spin on the road movie.
Oscars
Read our interviews with the nominees, our reviews of the nominated films and more.
What do you think?
Post your review now