Foursome

4

Directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky

The New York Times Magazine recently published a story about the rise in sales of pre-cut apple slices, which are glazed with edible wax to keep them from spoiling: a popular new process because it allows squeamish, antiseptic-minded Americans to eat apples without having to deal with a chewed-up apple core, a visible reminder of our animal natures. That tidbit alone tells me why 4, a visionary drama written by postmodern literary provocateur Vladimir Sorokin and directed by first-timer Ilya Khrzhanovsky, probably won't be a box-office success in this country. It's easily the most visceral work of art on screens right now: A chewed-up, yellowed apple core of a movie which insists that while humans are capable of love, reason, art and commerce, we're still mammals who have to eat, drink, shit, piss and fuck. This bleak, meandering, elliptical drama follows three solitary Russians as they journey through symbolically charged landscapes. The main characters are Volodya (Sergey Shnurov), a piano tuner; Marina (Marina Vovchenko), a prostitute; and Oleg (Yuri Laguta), a boss at a meat warehouse.

Volodya, Marina and Oleg end up drinking at the same bar and telling a series of whopping lies (respectively, they claim to be a geneticist, a sales manager and a high Kremlin official), then go their separate ways.

Volodya dances all night at a club, then gets picked up for a Kafkaesque interrogation by unspecified representatives of the country's military-industrial complex who are on the prowl for fresh draftees (i.e., fresh meat) to fight in an unspecified foreign war. Oleg dines solo in a restaurant, where the maitre d' piques his professional curiosity by telling him about a new, genetically engineered breed of "round pig" (we see them laid out in the kitchen, four abreast). Then he goes home to the apartment he shares with his dad, an obsessive-compulsive who can't stop cleaning the place (he's obviously a pre-sliced apple guy).

Marina gets a phone message telling her that her sister has died and heads out to the boonies for a vodka-and-pork catered funeral. The event unites a remote community which-except for a depressed brother and two lovely sisters-consists mainly of fat, cackling crones that earn a living making dolls from chewed bread.

My enthusiasm for 4 is not without caveats. First, there's an unmodulated, sometimes monotonous too-muchness in Khrzhanovsky's direction, which consists of meticulously composed, static wide shots, super-wobbly handheld close-ups and not much in between. The film's feasting and vodka-guzzling scenes drive home the idea of man-as-animal in a too-obvious way (the exaggerated chewing and swallowing noises are very Sergio Leone). And while I welcome any chance to peruse Vovchenko's ripe, real body, one of her many full-frontal nude scenes seemed too much like box-office insurance.

Second, while allowing that my unfamiliarity with Sorokin's fiction handcuffs my analysis, I must concede that-after two viewings-I'm not convinced that all the film's symbolism coheres. Khrzhanovsky's nonstop invocation of the number "4"-obliquely approached in an early Volodya monologue, and repeatedly invoked via Peter Greenaway-like tableaus (the film often plays like a voluptuously physical cousin of Drowning by Numbers)-is provocative but aggressively opaque, in a grad-school-experimental-theater-workshop sort of way.

There's a suggestion that the number 4 represents a sense of completeness missing from every layer of life-from the macro level (post-Soviet Russia is depicted as a Hobbesian wasteland being systematically torn down and rebuilt into something more orderly) to the configurations of characters that are missing a critical fourth element (Marina's dead sister, for instance).

Does the number 4 represent the closure, happiness or full knowledge of our purpose on earth? Or does it represent the impossibility of every attaining such things? Or are the filmmakers just giving us a bunch of blanks to fill in however we please? For now, I'll give this film the benefit of every doubt because it's confident, mysterious and powerful, and because there's a shortage of films that invite this degree interpretation and engagement. See 4 in a theater, preferably at least twice. Just don't plan on having dinner afterward.