4 Review

‘The possibility of becoming the same as everyone else, not only in my behaviour, but in my inner structure would make me unable to feel real things, and would formalise everything – this is of such great concern to me that the film turned out to be partially about this. It’s about different-sameness.’ So says the director, Ilya Khrzahnovsky, on 4 (2005), a strange film about the odd concept of ‘different-sameness’, although even the DVD blurb is big enough to admit ‘it’s quite clear that something is going on – even if we don’t know what’.   

The film opens with prostitute Marina (Marina Vovchenko), meat merchant Oleg (Yuri Laguta) and piano tuner Volodya (Sergey Shnurov) randomly meeting in a bar, only to each begin constructing alternate identities for themselves. Marina passes herself off as a marketing manager for a new Japanese gizmo, Oleg pretends to work for the president (albeit only supplying him with bottled water) and Volodya claims to work on the secretive cloning operation that has worked successfully underground in Russia for years.

This first hour of the film is the strongest, as each lie slowly comes back in some way to haunt the characters, some even finding their actual lives becoming just as fictional as the fibs told in the bar. Constantly filmed in interesting ways with a brilliantly disgusting sound design, 4 (for it’s 1^st half at least) provides an interesting comment on the idea that our lives run smoothly thanks to the lies we tell. These characters seem to share Khrzahnovsky’s fear of becoming the same as everyone else and so invent these alternative lifestyles that, for one conversation at least, propel them out of the drudgery of their real lives and into important roles in society.

I have never been to Russia and thanks to the images seen in 4, I don’t think I ever really want to. Stray dogs roam the streets and can be found in almost every frame of the film set outside. Huge bulldozers and other heavy machinery clog the atmosphere with smoke. The people in the film make the faces of Fellini look desirable as Khrzahnovsky appears to have cast those with only, shall we say, unusually put together faces; all helping to cast Russia in a delightfully nightmarish glow.

And yet, despite the undeniably bleak landscapes and communities who look older than they probably are, the film is full of darkly comic moments. One scene in which two old ladies pull, tug and slap their own bare breasts is a sure-fire laugh or cry moment, depending on your tolerance for 75-year old stretch marks.

The film’s lack of any real point does begin to outstay its welcome when Marina goes to a funeral full of old women who make dolls from chewed up pieces of bread but despite this, 4 is ultimately an interesting, visually arresting, albeit pointless film that raises some interesting questions about the inconvenience that is truth.

Here’s the opening minute of the film. It very much starts as it means to go on so this is a fairly decent test to see if you’ll be able to stomach this kind of inventive but seemingly meaningless action. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FcUyGAapjg&feature=player_embedded