DAU. Natasha + DAU. Degeneration
berlinale
DAU. Natasha and DAU. Degeneration are the first two movies released from the DAU Project, which can be described as the closest thing to Synechdoche, New York. While the latter is a fiction movie, the former is more of a hellish reality where all the characters had to live for years inside a structure and recreate the environment of an oppressive communist microcosm.
The DAU Project, an ambitious and fascinating work directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky began as a biopic of Nobel Prize-winning soviet scientist Lev Landau but a few weeks before shooting the director changed the idea and decided to start over again with another project. A 13’000 square meters set was built in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in order to recreate a Soviet science institute and the director, hired artists and civilised people instead of actors to give a more realistic experience to the audience. Financed and helped by the Russian oligarch and businessman, Sergei Adoniev, Khrzhanovsky had the opportunity to stage his artistic view.
The DAU Project quickly degenerated, no pun intended, and became this huge assembly where people had to live 24 hours a day and work under “oppressive” circumstances at times. Throughout the years in fact several controversies aroused over the methods embraced by Khrzhanovsky, and investigations are still going on nowadays over the presumed abuses over women and children, the torture of animals and the overall graphic violence showed in these movies.
Given the huge amount of footage (over 700 hours), Khrzhanovsky decided to make different movies that span 30 twenty years of the life in this scientific institute (1938-1968 approximately). Each one of them is focused on various characters and stories, that are all linked in different ways; for instance it could be the presence of a peculiar character (such as the titular one, Lev Landau), or the emotional and highly traumatic journeys many characters share.
DAU. Natasha was officially presented at the 2020 Berlinale and it’s curious to analyse why Khrzhanovsky chose this movie as the first one to be shown to a larger audience. It works effectively as an introduction to this world, showing the oppressive treatment the main character, Natasha, will receive throughout the movie. Furthermore, it presents some situations that will characterise the upcoming movies, such as long drinking sequences between the comrades of the institute, the claustrophobic atmosphere, the strong graphic content and especially the moral complications of some scenes.
DAU. Natasha is set in the early 1950s and follows a couple of days of the titular character Natasha, played by Natalia Berezhnaya, a waitress who is employed in the canteen of the institute. She works with a much younger and beautiful girl, Olga (Olga Shkabarnya), whom she has a conflicting relationship, a very much love-hate one that evokes at times a childish behaviour while an erotic tension can be felt as well between the two women in other scenes. The movie opens with a rather brilliant approach; while the screen remains black, Natasha, as she cashes up for the night, can be heard singing a folkloristic song, a behaviour that was not well accepted by the communist authorities. This might be the most subtle scene the whole project contains, and works extremely well opposite the explicit sequences later on.
The relationship between Olga and Natasha is explored early on when, after an exhausting shift, the two women start drinking the leftover champagne and discuss their love life. The generational conflict is remarked here and the two start bickering and fighting in a childish way. Acting is pretty amateurish in this scene from Shkabarnya, clearly showing her inexperience in front of the camera. Berezhnaya is way more confident in this aspect and is effective in conveying and expressing the frustration, and anger towards Olga, while still adding some tenderness in this complex relationship.
The focus then shifts briefly to Alexey Blinov, the Head of the Experimental Department, and Luc Bigé, a french scientist who has arrived in the institute to run an experiment on a device that promises to increase the endurance of men. The experiment is successful and the scientist go celebrating in the canteen where Olga has organised a little party. Here Bigé meets Natasha and the two spend the night drinking and end up sleeping together. From now on the movie will take a different turn, in that the viewer will not only witness the oppressive journey of Natasha but will feel the emotional turmoil of the actress as well.
According to both Khrzhanovsky and DP Jürgen Jürges in fact there was no real script and 90% of the dialogue was improvised by the actors, with the former giving only a couple of instructions and the latter and his crew following them with the camera.
“I’m off. What for? For fuck’s sake. Fucking hell, every fucking day. Damn you, all of you. I wish you every fucking happiness and success and load of money too. ...”
That’s just a brief extract from the monologue a drunk Natasha/Natalia Berezhnaya has after another fight with Olga. This is a really impressive scene from an acting point of view, and this emotional breakdown is a tough scene to sit through as Natasha hangs around in the canteen in tears and breaks things up. But then, if someone keeps close attention to the words of this monologue it will become obvious that those are not Natasha’s words but Berezhnaya’s, expressing her palpable frustration over the project.
Another highly moral questionable scene is the infamous interrogation one. Natasha is conducted in a remote room of The Institute where she is interrogated by Vladimir Azhippo, himself an ex KGB interrogator in real life. The officer wants to know about the affair between the woman and Luc Bigé and what follows are, again, some really tough sequences to sit through.
What started as a “friendly conversation”, as Azhippo states, quickly escalates in a terrible nightmare for Natasha, as she has to suffer atrocious and terrible things. Natalia Berezhnaya tour de force “performance” continues here, the actress shows a certain composure throughout the scene and her interactions with Azhippo are somehow fascinating due to Natasha/Berezhnaya‘s manners. Despite this strong facet presented by Natasha, the audience will still feel the fear, the confusion and the discomfort of the situation.
As the movie ends, the viewer will struggle to understand what has just happened; in that there’s a moral ambiguity surrounding over whether some scenes were planned or not and that will rise more questions than answers. But that’s probably what makes each movie of the DAU Project a fascinating yet disturbing experience. One thing for sure is that the movie will shock many people but DAU. Natasha will be discussed and remembered in the years to come as well.