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Jul
17
2007

Fantasia Report: The Sword Bearer (Меченосец) Review

Posted by Todd Brown at 8:55am.

Posted in Film & DVD Reviews , Drama, Action, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Continental Europe & Russia, Fantasia Festival 2007.

swordbearer.jpg

[Fantasia info page here.]

Philip Yankovskiy’s The Sword Bearer is a film unlike any other, one that takes a premise familiar from The Watchmen—what would it look like if an actual person in the real world were to have super powers—and then plays it surprisingly and compellingly for a purely adult audience. The Sword Bearer is a super hero film for the art house set, highly impressionistic with heavy noir overtones, lacing its stunning photography with bursts of shockingly graphic violence all while focusing purely and entirely on the emotional journey of its central character. The blend here is unique—equal parts art and popcorn, character and action, all of laced with tragedy—and that it works at all, never mind working as incredibly well as it does, is purely a testament to Yankovsky’s skills behind the camera and the magnetic performances turned in by Artyom Tkachenko and Chulpan Khamatova as the doomed lovers at the center of the piece.

Sasha (Tkachenko) is a man cursed with an overwhelming power, one that has controlled and dominated his life far more than he has ever controlled it, one that has set him apart from society and made him an outcast since childhood leaving him an angry man prone to lashing out with violence. Hoping to find some peace with himself Sasha returns to his home town where, far from being welcomed, an encounter with a lover from his younger days leaves him beaten and bloody in the middle of the street, a beating he repays later that night with a metal pipe leaving his assailant in the hospital and Sasha himself on the run from both police and a high ranking Russian mafioso.

It is clear here, right from the very beginning, that Sasha is not a good man. He has horrible violence in his past, in his present, and by all indications in his future as well. He is ruthless and cold blooded and will exact horrible retribution against any who draw his anger. In any other film, in any other world, Sasha would be the villain of the piece, not the hero, but Yankovskiy’s film is set in a slowly decaying Russia where everyone is on the take, everyone is corrupt, everyone is dangerous and untrustworthy and any sort of purity of intent immediately elevates you above the masses no matter how broken and violent you may be otherwise. For Sasha that purity comes in the form of Katya, a woman he meets totally at random and falls powerfully and immediately in love with. It is a romance doomed from the start and Sasha knows it: he knows what he is and what lies in his future, but for at least a brief moment he can imagine and reach for something better in his life. It all, of course, ends in tragedy.

The Sword Bearer plays more like memory than conscious narrative, the story stripped to its absolute bare essentials and presented as a series of key moments, encounters and desires. Yankovskiy certainly gives you enough to put the narrative together but he absolutely never tells you what he can show you, always opts to make you feel rather than think or understand. He wants you simply to feel as Sasha feels and strips away everything that may distract from that, keeping dialogue to an absolute minimum. The plot line is present, yes, and drives constantly forward but Yankovskiy is far more interested in who Sasha is and what he feels than with what Sasha does and so the film spends far more time with the quiet moments on the side—the glances and raw impulses, the bits that are easily overlooked taken individually but combine as a whole to make us who we are—than it does taking us to the next action sequence.

Which is not, of course, to say that those sequences are not there. We see Sasha in action and we see it often. What it does mean is that Yankovskiy always keeps the action element of the film in service to the character work. Every time we see Sasha use his power it tells us more about him, we see another piece of him fall into place and we gradually see him change. The film excercises enormous restraint in the early going, keeping the violence implied and off screen, showing the aftermath if anything, then gradually becoming more and more explicit to match Sasha’s gradually rising sense of desperation—this is a man who has likely never had anything he valued enough to fear losing before in his life—so that when the end finally comes and we witness Sasha flailing about in raw desperation, blindly expending his full force in a final hopeless attempt to defend Katya from the consequences of being associated with him, it packs as much an emotional force as physical.

As sparse and spare a script as this is uttely reliant on quality performances and a skilled hand behind the camera if it is to succeed and The Sword Bearer has both. Yankovskiy has a stunning eye, the film filled with a stream of incredibly images of a society in decay, architecture and landscapes both seemingly crumbling away into nothing. The film is shot through an amber filter with the color values just slightly oversaturated giving everything a feeling both slightly surreal and nostalgic. The scripting feels like wistful memory and the visuals more than match. And, as stated earlier, both Tkachenko and Khamatova are very strong in the leads, both giving their characters believable depth and a compelling sort of soulfulness despite the script giving minimal back story for Sasha—this aint no origin story, there’s no hint at all as to where his powers came from—and none whatsoever for Katya.

The Sword Bearer is likely going to have a rather difficult time finding an audience. It is too thoughtful by far to draw the teen crowd that normally goes for this sort of thing, about as far from the Hollywood whiz-bang approach to this type of material as is humanly possible. It is also, however, incredibly violent for the art house set, featuring graphic amputations and eviscerations. It doesn’t really fit neatly into either world, taking elements it likes from both and reshaping them into something remarkable and unusual, categories that often lead, unfortunately, to financial failure. But whatever it may be, whether it find a mass audience or not, this is a compelling piece of work that marks Yankovskiy as a major talent.

The film is now available in a pair of Russian editions, a standard single disc and a two disc set that includes the soundtrack CD. Despite packaging that says otherwise the transfer is anamorphic widescreen and quite strong. Audio quality is good and the optional English subtitles are excellent. Though I am still just beginning to dip my toe into the Russian DVD market I am already realizing that Vox Video—the DVD company behind these releases—is one of the good ones, their releases always featuring strong translations and typically very strong transfers. This comes very highly recommended.

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Reader Comments

  1. jon pais 11/20/2006 @ 12:21am

    Sounds fantastic, can’t wait for mine to arrive.

  2. Egg 11/20/2006 @ 4:20am

    We see Sasha in action and we see it often.

    Really? I can only remember a handful, if that, of action sequences many of which are literally seconds in length. It’s one of the factors that disappointed me about the film. The action that was there was fantastic but I would really have liked to have seen more.

    The romance with Katya annoyed me too. It seemed really forced. I’m all for the “love at first sight” scenario but I’ve generally found that it’s not executed well onscreen, looking more like a story element that’s being squeezed in instead of evolving organically. I do agree that Katya and Sasha have really great chemisty. Not to mention the fact that Katya is stunning.

    One sequence has me confused. The section where Sasha is up on the roof tops (where it repeatedly cuts between him and his mother opening the envelope of money Sasha has sent her) and then he begins to hack at his hand. I assumed he was trying to cut his hand off and relieve himself of the torment it had brought him but he shows no sign of injury in the following scenes. Was he hacking at the sword itself? Can he rapidly regenerate? Was it a dream sequence? Perhaps you can clear it up.

    The subtitles did surprise me actually. I was expected them to be somewhat hit and miss ala Day Watch, but there were only a few grammatical errors in the entire film. None of which hinder the film in anyway. I just wish that they would subtitle written words (signs, letters etc) aswell as speech.

    I’d generally agree with your review.The first quarter of the movie is quite slow and can be hard work but once Katya is introduced it really does seem to find the right pace for the movie.

  3. Todd Brown 11/20/2006 @ 5:57am

    All fair comments, Egg. As for the action, like I say in the review they keep it really restrained in the early going but I really like how they manage to imply so much without being explicit about it, a key example being the shattering windshield when he takes out Katya’s would-be rapist. I really loved that shot and others like it. Yeah, the violence comes in short bursts, but isn’t that how it would really happen? How do you fight a guy who can take you down without laying a hand on you? You don’t, really, you just go down in a heap ...

    Very good comment on the subtitles ... I wish they’d subbed the letter from his mother as well, but I didn’t find it took away from the story at all and actually fit with the aesthetic of the thing coming as close as it did to the club sequence when the dialogue is intentionally blocked by the music.

    Can he regenerate? It’s certainly a possibility. He is remarkably resilient. That definitely wasn’t a dream sequence, though, as it repeats the attempts he made to take the hand off as a child. Whether it’s that he regenerates or that the metal inside him just can’t be broken the hand just aint coming off ...

    One of the things I really like about the film is that it just doesn’t feel the need to explain things like that, this guy just is what he is. It’s a refreshing approach, really, and i think they pull it off really well.

  4. JoshuaPettigrew 11/20/2006 @ 11:44am

    Totally awesome!! I can’t wait to get my copy. Thanks for the thoughts on this one Todd!

  5. Todd Brown 11/20/2006 @ 11:59am

    Not a problem. I really loved this film, found it far more satisfying than either of the Watch films and think it’s pretty easily the cream of the recent batch of Russian genre films. I’m on a mission to get it into some festivals now so people can see it on the big screen ... should be bloody gorgeous projected from 35 ...

  6. Egg 11/20/2006 @ 1:12pm

    I definately agree with you about the Katya/rapist scene. Even with the high paced nature of the scene it’s still easy to keep up due to the fantastic camera usage and overall direction.

    I guess that leads me to another point, Sasha never really has a nemesis. He is constantly persued but it’s pretty much established that eventhough he can take a beating, he will return (incredibly quickly) and take vengeance. I guess I’m just somewhat used to the ‘hero/villain’ formula that seeing Sasha’s only weakness, or atleast the only one hinted at in the film, is also his greatest hope—Katya, just seems a bit odd to me. Not necessarily a bad point just something different (for me atleast).

    The subs, or lack of, during visual text is something that seems to happen quite frequently and although it was made in this section it’s kind of a general grievance with foreign films. The scene with his mother I just took as him paying her back for all the times that she had to pay for the things he damaged (due to his ability), especially when she made reference to that in a previous scene. It doesn’t lessen the scene in anyway and I’m sure some people wouldn’t be too concerned but I guess I’m just a completist http://twitchfilm.net/site/images/smileys/rasberry.gif

    Which version of the disc did you get, the single or the dvd/cd combo? I got the combo but I’m yet to put on the cd.

    I was surprised at how much crap advertising there was on the disc though. Was a bit of a culture shock as I’m just used to multiple disclaimers as opposed to adverts for radio stations.

    I’d say I enjoyed Night Watch slightly more than this but this was definately a better film than Day Watch.

  7. Todd Brown 11/20/2006 @ 3:05pm

    I’ve got the two disc. And yeah, the ads are the one down side to Vox releases, every one of them has them and one is always that counterfeit money detector.

  8. Sergey 12/28/2006 @ 11:18am

    This movie totally sucked—no energy, no that Russian mystic-spirit, no humor just prentetious faces and poses.

  9. louie 04/13/2007 @ 2:55am

    graveh that muvi… i wanted it for my whole life it is rili a unexplainable…

    i like to watch it again… again en again infinity..

    di ako nasasawa..

  10. yevgeni 05/25/2007 @ 4:55am

    will this be getting a dvd release in north america ? Todd? do you know? Best russian film of last year hands down.

  11. toddly6666 07/17/2007 @ 6:20pm

    This film doesn’t fit into any category because it’s a total piece of crap. It’s boring, poor direction, awful storytelling/flow, has NO action, especially nothing interesting with his knife powers. This movie is a total amateurish movie, even worse than a direct-to-video or made-to-tv movie. Don’t waste your time, unless you have insomnia and need a bad movie to put you to sleep.

  12. collin a 07/18/2007 @ 11:53am

    With AllDVD.ca out of commission for the time being, anyone know where else to pick this up?

  13. Tuan Jim 07/20/2007 @ 2:16am

    I got mine at xploitedcinema.com—I think they have the version w/ and w/out soundtrack CD (which I think is copy protected since my computer can’t read it).

  14. VladiMir 07/20/2007 @ 8:32pm

    Actually this film is one of the best latest movies i’ve seen. It is definitely far away from hollywood style, but it’s very authentic, very romantic and at the same time very cruel.

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