Dau

Dau begins as Einstein meets Eisenstein. Not literally, I need to add. But director Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s manic montage, inspired by the old Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein, flashes dream-like visions and chaos onto the screen like the probabilistic appearances, fluctuations of elementary particles, images of startling vividness and violence, until finally the wave function collapses into narrative.

It is, when your eyes readjust, a dazzling opening to a dazzling film. 

Dau – based loosely on Nobel laureate Lev Landau and played by Greek classical music composer, Teodor Currentzis – is the brightest of the Soviet physicists, a socially gauche genius, who heads to Kharkiv during the Ukraine famine to join an elite group of scientists who are being pressured by the military to use their work in theoretical physics to produce weapons. Pressure turns to intimidation by the security services, and then violence against his colleagues, but Dau has at least discovered love over a meal of sheep’s head (don’t knock it until you try the eyeballs) with factory girl Nora, played by Radmila Shchogolieva, one of the few professional actors in the cast. 

As things get out of control in Kharkiv, Dau takes refuge with his old mentor Krupitsa, the director of a secret institute for science (played by theatre director Anatoly Vasiliev), where he finds himself out of the frying pan and into the atomic fire. The applications of the science have become truly terrifying. His principled stance leads to a vicious beating, and the compromises he is forced to make begin to effect his deteriorating relationship with Nora as he seeks some relief in a hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. 

Remarkably Dau began filming in 2008 and ended only recently. It involved a cast of hundreds and is a central part of Khrhanovsky’s wider Dau project, which involves a planned 16 films. It’s the third to be released to the public, following DAU. Natasha and DAU. Degeneration. 

It is, when your eyes readjust, a dazzling opening to a dazzling film

Its scale is evident in many gob-smacking street scenes, as well as a scale reproduction of the K7 aircraft, one of the largest airplanes ever produced. A series of striking images visualise the mind of a man whose thinking surpassed classical Newtonian geometry. In one scene, everyone walks tilted backwards at a 30-degree angle to the ground. In another, Dau and Krupitsa discuss the morality of building the bomb while apparently suspended in the air by an MC Escher-esque structure. Another scene of semi-naked men climbing a flaming tower evokes Hieronymus Bosch.

Dau is a tragedy of impossible decisions. Unlike the US, these scientists had no choice but to comply. They philosophise about whether physical or spiritual pain is worse, like good Tolstoyan Russians, but when the pain ramps up, the rubber hose has the weight of an incontrovertible argument. There’s been controversy over the treatment of the cast during the filming, but it feels like the project has become a victim of its own blurring of reality and fiction – or its own marketing. 

What remains is not a comfortable watch, but it is vital and compelling cinema that’s ambitious in scale and uncompromising in vision. And as a portrait of an authoritarian regime in which power is expressed in the most vile and inhumane ways, it has an urgency that is all too contemporary.

Dau premiered at the Venice Film Festival.