Director: Max Karpylev
Writer: Max Karpylev
Cast: Vladimir Kurtseba, Ekaterina Makarova, Sergey Novikov
Running time: 49mins
The provenance of Max Karpylev’s first feature film, The Muse, is somewhat enigmatic. The film’s submission has its country of origin as the United States. In the opening scenes, the actors’ conversations are conducted in Russian, so your reviewer was working under the assumption that the movie was a depiction of the experiences of Russian emigres in the USA. However, after about ten minutes of watching, something did not seem quite right – I checked the submission’s specifications and discovered that the movie was filmed in the Russian Federation.
Essentially, The Muse is a Russian film. Fine by me – not the fault of the filmmaker that they live under a vicious autocracy.
My wrong assumption was an easy one to make. 21st century cityscapes are, in the main, homogeneous, and interchangeable. The movie was shot in winter in a snow bound landscape. New England or the Moscow hinterland – snow looks the same anywhere. And the cultural artefacts of the global elite are, like the snow, pretty much the same the world over. The latter point is crucial as The Muse is set entirely in a milieu of wealth, status, and power – a movie about rich people.
Karpylev submitted the film in December 2022. Putin launched the special military operation and started to bomb the shit out of Ukraine on 24 February of that year. Developments subsequent to the invasion, presumably, explain why the movie was submitted as an American film.
24 February 2022 changed the world political economy, as Mr Yeats would have had it, utterly. Again, another assumption, some of the movie would have either have been being filmed or been in post-production in the ten months between the start of the war and the release date. Yet, we would never guess watching The Muse that we were viewing a country in wartime. There are occasional oblique references and one direct reference to how the film’s protagonists came by their wealth and their relationship with the regime but that is all. The film comes across as some strange anachronistic artefact – portraying characters living in an epoch that the audience can see is irrevocably past. The American folklorist, Captain Beefheart caught this feeling when he sang … the past sure is tense. See those people up on the fence – they’re in past tense.
To the film.
The Muse tells the story of Mark, a novelist, played by Vladimir Kurtseba. Mark has a difficult, conflicted relationship with his father, some sort of top-level functionary in a government agency referred to as The Department, played by Sergey Novikov. In the film’s only overt political reference, Mark in a fraught exchange with the father accuses him of being – the guy who steals other people’s taxes. Mark is emotionally sustained by his partner, Masha, played by Ekaterina Makarova, who is pregnant and is the eponymous muse of the film’s title. Makarova’s character is very much earth mother and somewhat inevitably her trade is that of a fine arts painter.
Mark is what you might call ‘fuck-off wealthy’. He drives a new British top of the range SUV and most of the action takes place in his brand new, splendidly tasteful modernist house in the country. The source of Mark’s riches is left unspoken, for the audience to work out. In conversation with the father, we learn that Mark has been unemployed for two years after quitting a ‘real’ job. Maybe a real job for someone with connections with the regime earned enough in Putinland to maintain themselves ever after in luxurious unemployment? Maybe Mark is sponging off the father? Then in conversation with Masha we learn that Mark has a contract for writing his novel from a prestigious international publisher. I would think many in the audience would wonder as to how gargantuan publishers’ advances for debut novelists must be in Russia. Followed quickly by the thought – 24 February has probably put paid to that particular revenue stream.
Mark has issues which appear to be connected to his relationship with his father. He hides away in the house and attempts to finish the novel. We see him suffering from writer’s block and then undergoing a mental health crisis.
Karpylev wrote the script as well as directing. I enjoyed the plotting. I especially liked the way Karpylev played with our expectations and gave us a non-linear narrative. We are left uncertain as to whether Masha leaves Mark and precipitates the crisis or whether she leaves because of Mark’s behaviour. Then again, we are not sure whether she has left at all – it is well done and gives the film a subtle ludic quality. Karpylev also pulls off the trick of giving the movie alternative endings without appearing overly creaky or stagey.
The actors put in reasonable shifts. Kurtseba is a trifle underwhelming in the lead as the anguished writer – I could not buy his portrayal of mental turmoil which seemed to express itself solely by Mark throwing or kicking various inanimate objects. Makarova is competent as the gendered positive angelic force of the muse. I enjoyed Novikov’s take on the curmudgeonly father.
But the movie is not really about narrative or characterisation – so much as it is about exhibiting its superb production values – amongst which I must briefly honour the movie’s excellent bespoke soundtrack credited to Eugene Gavrolov and Alex Butov. But above all, The Muse is preoccupied with colour.
Karpylev is a member of the ‘Colorist Society International’ (whatever that may be) and his director’s biography states that “he utilizes his deep understanding of colour psychology” in his filmmaking. The statement is not false – the use of colour in The Muse is something to behold. There are so many memorable scenes where the use of colour is breath-taking. Scenes that will stay with you long after viewing the movie. Karpylev is aided by Ilya Saveliev’s superb cinematography.
Here are some to look out for.
The opening sequence. We see a city scape – some nameless Russian city which I mistook to be New York. The light and colour are like something by Vermeer or one of those distant glimpses of a city in a Northern Renaissance altarpiece. The camera cuts to an interior shot of a stairwell – the walls are turquoise/green, and the bannisters are bronze – we see walking up the stairs, a man, Mark. Mark is wearing a stylish cashmere overcoat – a tan colour that perfectly offsets the green and bronze of the surroundings. Mark arrives at the top of the stairs and enters his father’s apartment. In order to contrast Mark’s stylish appearance and emphasise the generational divide – the décor here is the height of Putin rococo bling, all swirling gold wallpaper, and mirrors – as if an interior designer had spiritually vomited over the set. A remarkable exercise in attempting to get the audience to ponder the nature of alterity.
The scene is almost matched by the introductory shots to Mark’s modernist stately pleasure dome. The house is a series of squares and rectangles – blocks of white walls and blue/black glass set in a snowy landscape with the leafless skeletons of a line of silver birch on the horizon. Kurtseba is costively shovelling snow out front. He is dressed in a blue/black topcoat and white slacks – his impossibly stylish polyvinyl shovel is jet black with royal blue edgings. Quite some picture.
At times, the emphasis on colour turns into self-parody. We get a looking down from the ceiling shot of the living room with Mark and Masha relaxing lying side by side on the floor dressed in matching dark blue and white plaid jogging bottoms and pearl grey t-shirts. The effect is so over the top – it had me thinking – really?
What is wrong with the above scene illustrates what I felt to be wrong with the movie as a whole. The Muse is an elegant, beautifully filmed failure. The movie is ostensibly about a mental health crisis but as we go through the gears of Kurtseba attempting to portray a human being in the depths of existential angst we keep getting distracted by the splendour of the director’s compositions – wow isn’t that shot perfectly framed as Mark kicks his laptop in frustration. Matters are not helped by the fact that a man who is supposed to be in terminal decline has somehow managed to shave himself to perfection for every scene. The only outward sign of inner turmoil seems to be the occasional lock of hair slightly amiss in Mark’s superb coiffure. Aiding the strange disconnect, is Karpylev’s compulsive habit of focusing in on the accoutrements of his character’s high social status – the loving, lingering shots of Mark’s Apple MacBook or their Apple Smart Watch. The overall effect is downright weird – as though we are watching an exquisitely rendered commercial video with mental health issues as the product on offer.
A movie about the tribulations and mental health issues of the Moscow elite is going to be a hard sell internationally in the present climate – with the possible exception of audiences in a few countries in the Sahel and maybe China, Iran, and North Korea. I wish Max Karpylev well. On the evidence of The Muse, they have the potential to become a fine director. I would suggest for the future they might try to marry up their ability to direct a movie that looks beautiful and has a coherent narrative structure with a corresponding ability to direct a movie that actually has some meaning other than a celebration of elite status and power.
As noted, some of the scenes in The Muse left an abiding memory. Perhaps the scene that had the greatest resonance was one that perhaps the director did not intend to be interpreted in the way that it came across to me. It is New Year’s Eve and celebratory fireworks light up the night sky above Mark’s house. The bursts of fire of the rockets irresistibly drew me to think about ballistic missiles hitting a hospital in Odessa or a spidery Ukrainian drone trying to hit the Moscow suburbs.
Or maybe that was the intention?