Compartment n. 6, a sweet and almost sleepwalking road movie – Francesco Boille

A sweet and almost sleepwalking road movie towards the extremes where in the end there is love, the most spiritual one, and without rhetoric. Arrive in the room Compartment n. 6, one of the most beautiful and enjoyable films of the last Cannes Film Festival, presented in competition where it won the Special Grand Prize of the jury, the third feature film by the Finnish Juho Kuosmanen and of which Movies Inspired had already brought the beautiful The true story of Olli Mäki, also awarded at Cannes in the Un certain regard section.

A road movie, we have said, but which takes place largely by train, in the cold, towards the Arctic Circle, therefore also an Arctic road movie, as highlighted by the production. Freely adapted from the novel of the same name by Finnish author Rosa Liksom (published by Iperborea), it is set in the nineties, with old long-distance trains and old cars. Laura, a young Finnish girl played by Seidi Haarla, an archeology student on a mission in search of petroglyphs (ten thousand year old rock drawings), finds herself in the sleeping car with a young Russian miner, Ljoha, played by Jurij Borisov. The first impact will not be the most pleasant, enough to push her to try to change compartment. Imprisoned in compartment number six, for Laura, but also for Ljoha, it will be not only a journey towards extremes but also of constant cohabitation with them.

The film is truly a space-time journey: it transits towards the most extreme point of the cold, towards the Russian city of Murmansk, an important port town not far from the Barents Sea, but in this strange mobile and motionless journey at the same time, the contrast between the movement of the train and the semi-immobility of the characters, to which is added that of the numerous stages, it leads to the discovery of other worlds, of other humanity, of a near and distant past.

We think of the Passage of the line (2007) by Pietro Marcello. Before the director moved on to directing fiction and actors, with Martin Eden (and pending his French musical with Louis Garrel), he was the author of many poetry documentaries like this one. The Passage of the line, which at the time was marketed by Internazionale on DVD, is a long nocturnal journey among the old express trains that portrays a forgotten humanity, of the last that the film makes first. But the film, among other things imbued with the highest lesson of Russian cinema, also seemed like a dream journey through memory, through time.

These last two aspects are common to Compartment n. 6 which is also a journey into memory and time of which the transporter machine is somehow this narrow space, compartment number 6, which Laura at first sight thinks is a prison, and where she believes she has been trapped.

From the beginning, with the archaeological question, the importance of memory is evoked as a fundamental question of identity, and a sentence from Laura is its seal: “To know yourself, you must know your past”.

But in addition to the past there is the present, perhaps the one furthest away from us, one and the other inseparable. The film is also a small journey of initiation into life and to different, opposite worlds. She, who so much would like to be part of the cultured and well-to-do world of archaeologists, is an expression of culture, she knows how to draw, to portray; he comes from humble backgrounds, he is a simple boy, with some evident inferiority complex towards the wealthier social classes, he absolutely does not know how to draw, and yet, when he does not drink and despite some vulgarity, he soon reveals a good and profound soul who knows how to listen. She loves and is attracted to women, he is heterosexual. The imponderable happens along the film, the one that seemed impossible: Laura, who wanted to change compartment at any cost, can no longer do without that reassuring company.

We will not say more, except that at each stage it is a discovery of a poor but worthy, warm and generous humanity, and that every time it is then nice to return home, that is to compartment number six. The director is of a rare skill not only in constructing the right situations, supported by excellent, essential and often direct dialogues – and certainly in this regard the original version is much preferable as the acting is intense and empathic – but also in capturing small and nevertheless unique, rare: an old woman who sells salted cucumbers observed by the dirty glass, is a shot that, in its opacity, creates a screen-cinematic effect on one side, and a phantom effect on the other. And that portrays, frames something that will never come back but of which we must keep the memory because it creates awareness. It could almost be defined Compartment n. 6 a live movie from the past. We are in the past and yet we are there, as if it were the present.

Present to which the entire film refers in a constant but not didactic way, since our societies have the absolute necessity, to survive in a peaceful way given the importance of the global challenges that are looming, not only to accept and tolerate but also to discover as true treasures the many opposite, distant worlds that coexist in the compartments in which we live in everyday life, more or less large depending on the case. Whether it’s heterogeneous families, condominiums, neighborhoods, cities. This is why the film invites us to reverse appearances, because those who seem reliable may not be, and vice versa. After all, the faces of the two protagonists are this: she and he are faces that are not flashy at first sight, but which gradually reveal their beauty and charm. There are apparent and deceptive treasures and hidden treasures that one must know how to find. Or rather, knowing how to see, listen. Produced with the participation, among others, of the Russian ministry of culture, without becoming a propaganda tool in the least, the film in some way speaks of peoples to peoples and, in extension, of the other.

Filmed in the apparently archaic mode of 35 millimeters, psychedelic but suffused, expression of an inner warm in opposition to the outer cold, dreamlike but impregnated with reality, nocturnal but bright like the light of dawn, capable of canceling the marshy reference points to create them new but at the same time retaining the best of the past, Compartment n. 6 is largely summarized in the titles of three songs, among the many of the heterogeneous, enthralling and never intrusive soundtrack: from the opening with Love is the drug by Roxy Music, passing through Love is all around sung by Tomi Alatalo and until the closing with the French Travel Travel played by Desireless. A real, authentic Christmas movie.