Ikonov

Young Vsevolod doesn’t know where to go. In his homeland, steel war bells are ringing, but he’s refusing to hear their call. So he makes his escape to Austria, where croissants carry the scent of peace, and a film he once starred in is being screened at a local film festival. However, no matter how hard he tries, Vsevolod never manages to really get there – this despite his having been in Vienna for quite some time, on the streets and in the movie theatre where a director who barely remembers Vsevolod offers him meager hospitality between botched Q&A sessions and his third tranquilizing beer. Did this lost soul ever actually leave his small hometown? Or was he transported by the light of the projector to a mystical borderland where present and past, dream and reality flow into each other?

Aleksey Lapin’s second feature length film, Ikonov, picks up the frayed thread the filmmaker laid out in his striking debut, Krai (2021). Once again, the form is “hybrid,” and once again Lapin’s cousin Vsevolod Nikonov plays an elusive version of himself – although this time the man with the beautiful but sad visage is dressed in a droll Christmas sweater. As with Krai, Ikonov blends tragedy and comedy, irony and melancholy. Documentary echoes of the war against Ukraine and a dull sense of alienation haunt this satirical portrait of a lackluster cultural scene: it’s as if Hong Sang-soo had made a film about Vienna. Lapin’s intricate metanarrative never feels overly intellectual. It uses clichés about the “Russian soul” and mocks them in the same breath, revels in Beethoven’s Seventh, swings its hips to moody synthpop from Lithuania – and somehow in this balancing act it manages to find something like a fragile home. (Andrey Arnold) 

Translation: John Wojtowicz