Pavel Ruminov Has A MUSKETEER’S VISIT

It’s been an interesting year for Russia’s Pavel Ruminov.  After a lengthy and difficult production process on his hotly anticipated Dead Daughters - a film slated for remake by Gold Circle and which sharply divided audiences upon it’s Russian release - Ruminov has taken a step back from the genre film that was the staple of his work until that point, instead preparing a largely improvised romantic drama titled Circumstances, or My Wife Is A Zombie.  We first reported on that one back in October and it’s slated to go in front of cameras in just a couple weeks.  But while working on that Ruminov has also been experimenting with something he calls ‘Naked Cinema’, raw verite style experiments that he says have reinvigorated his love of film making and which have spawned a new feature film titled Musketeer’s Visit.  He explains it better than I would:

It’s one of the project of Naked Cinema cycle I invented for doing what I love without damage of my nervious system ‘cos I want to be alive on my son’s marriage day. It’s my personal lab, film school, with no aims or plans attached to the process of making a film.

In fact, they are not even films, they are sketches of stories that can’t be realized in a regular way. An idea either fades away or turns into a naked movie – a movie ‘with nothing to it’, like we sometimes have rice, bread or water with nothing to complement them. A naked film is made with what was at hand and with those who are ready to do something just for the sake of pleasure, curiosity and self-development; a naked film is not THE FILM but the IDEA of impossible film in some material form.

It’s Osho type of filmmaking, paranoia-free and easy-going. 

I didn’t know what to do with the Musketeers’s idea, it was doomed to die without any chance to be financed if I didn’t make a naked movie out of it. Now I have this on disc, I can show it to people, they react to it, the movie exists, and it’s all a little miracle for me.

THE MUSKETEER STORY

Three girls have a party. One of them (Nica) makes a shocking announcement: her new boy-friend they’re waiting for the party is turned out to be the local weirdo called Musketeer…

All the movie is 2-days improvisation but within very tight and classical plot formula. I was trying to combine the documentary feeling with the power of classical art conventions, something I admire more and more on works of Handel or Bach. I don’t want it to be avant-garde or modern or something, it’s a simple and old story with the beginning, middle and the end.

The length is 80 minutes. Shot on two videocams, in cinema-verite, fly-on-the-wall manner and all this Dogme “poverty” is the thing that makes the story works.