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Because the Russian alphabet has no direct equivalent of the letter “H,” speakers often substitute a “G” sound; “Harry Potter” thus becomes “Garry Potter.” We’re reminded of this funny detail early and often in “My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow,” a film that otherwise does not overflow with amusements. In this gripping, fiercely moving five-and-a-half-hour documentary, the Russian-born American director Julia Loktev follows several Moscow-based journalists, most of them women in their twenties and thirties, through a few increasingly grim months in late 2021 and early 2022. For many of the journalists, Harry Potter is a much-needed source of escapism, levity, and anti-totalitarian metaphor. Alesya Marokhovskaya, a data reporter for the media outlet Important Stories, bakes her friend a bright-pink birthday cake, in loving homage to a similar gesture by Harry’s loyal friend Hagrid. Ksenia Mironova, who works at the independent channel TV Rain, shows off a photo of herself and Tom Felton, the film actor who played Harry’s nemesis Draco Malfoy. When Russia launches a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022, it doesn’t take long for the journalists, in shock and horror, to invoke their most beloved pop-culture touchstone. They aren’t alone: as the first months of the war unfold, Russian social-media feeds, we’re told, are awash in Potter allusions, many of which cast the imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny as the heroic young Harry—and Vladimir Putin, naturally, as Voldemort.
Life, however prone to imitating art, has a long-standing aversion to art’s happy endings. Navalny died in prison last year, Putin remains in power, and the war in Ukraine rages miserably on, three and a half years after it began. In flashing back to an eerie moment of calm before the storm, “My Undesirable Friends: Part I” operates, on one level, as a pre-dystopian time capsule. “The world you are about to see no longer exists,” Loktev says at the outset. She arrived in Moscow in October, 2021, shortly after the government, cracking down on widespread pro-Navalny protests, began branding independent journalists as “foreign agents.” Among this fast-growing class of undesirables was Loktev’s friend Anna Nemzer, a talk-show host for TV Rain (and a co-director on the film). Over the next few months, Loktev filmed Nemzer and several of her journalist pals and colleagues rigorously and relentlessly. Striving to be as nimble and invisible as possible, she operated as a one-woman crew and shot with an iPhone. The last footage we see was filmed on March 2, 2022, the day that nearly all Loktev’s principal players fled Russia. As the war in Ukraine got under way, they rightly feared that the government’s persecution of journalists—and its blockage of any reporting that didn’t conform to propaganda talking points—would only intensify.
What we see unfold, during those terrible few months, is an astonishing epic of uncertainty, anxiety, and despair, and of defiant, illogical hope—and Loktev, a filmmaker of exacting patience, hurries none of it along. “My Undesirable Friends: Part I,” which begins a one-week run at Film Forum on Friday, unfolds in five roughly hour-long chapters; each one is propelled by a sickening sense of collective dread, and also by a spirit of journalistic community that feels fragile, resilient, and hard-won. The film’s transfixing power arises from our knowledge of what is coming, even as the people onscreen, for all their professionally honed smarts and well-founded suspicions, have no idea. That more or less meets Hitchcock’s definition of suspense, and Loktev, until now best known for her scripted features, has long evinced some of the old master’s instincts. (Hence the shivery precision of her 2007 feature, “Day Night Day Night,” a lean existential thriller that tracks a nineteen-year-old aspiring suicide bomber—step by determined step, beat by agonizing beat—as she sets out to blow herself up in Times Square.)
As a subtitle, “Last Air in Moscow” proves apt and evocative. The women we meet are free to move about—Loktev films them walking down the street, sitting and texting in cars, navigating the newsroom bustle, and hanging out in their own and one another’s apartments—but the cumulative effect is that of a sealed chamber, from which every breath of oxygen is slowly being drained away. That might sound sadistic; indeed, sadism is something of a Hitchcockian virtue. But this is real life, not fiction, and Loktev isn’t coldly observing her subjects from on high or yanking them along on unseen strings. She’s right there with them, and her camera, wavering barely inches from their faces, seems to take everything in: phone calls, work meetings, pet-cuddling sessions, group hangouts, bursts of laughter, and escalating flurries of panic. Loktev shows us these individuals during some of the most unsettled, unguarded moments of their lives, and she does it with a persistence that can’t have been easy for her or her subjects to manage. “You just jump in like that. I haven’t combed my hair even,” a woman muses, as she opens the door to Loktev’s camera; months later, she’s clearly worn down, greeting the filmmaker with an exasperated “Julia, don’t film yet, please.”
But Loktev keeps finding her way in, for reasons that gradually become clear. There is, of course, the invaluable spotlight she casts on the work of independent journalists, struggling to tell the truth in defiance of a bureaucratic organism devoted to suppressing any hint of dissent. We spend time with Nemzer in the TV Rain studio, where she interviews a range of individuals, including activists who are speaking up for the rights of immigrants, the homeless, and people with disabilities; in one segment, discussing the shutdown of the human-rights organization Memorial, Nemzer draws historical connections between Russia’s Stalinist past and its Putinist present. Elsewhere in the film, Elena Kostyuchenko, a thirtysomething investigative reporter for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, speaks of how Russia’s wartime propaganda—especially during its earlier invasions of Crimea and Georgia—has galvanized an up-and-coming generation of journalistic truth-seekers, who “refuse to live in this schizophrenic bullshit” and eagerly throw themselves into dangerous, exhausting, and wholly unlucrative work.
Loktev grants us glimpses of life lived on the margins of that work, and the unwavering steadiness of her gaze obliterates any distinctions between the personal, the professional, and the political. There is romance here, though the faces of significant others are generally kept out of frame. Alesya Marokhovskaya bakes her Harry Potter cake with her girlfriend, and, in the space of a few caught-on-the-fly moments, their relationship opens a window into the ingrained homophobia of larger Russian society. Ksenia Mironova copes with the absence of her fiancé, also a journalist, who is in prison on charges of treason. At every turn, we’re reminded that these individuals, devoted to telling the stories of others, have important stories of their own to tell—about what it means to feel informed yet uncertain, and to wield a power that continually places them in danger, even as it offers others invaluable guidance, knowledge, and insight. They can’t see the full arc of that story as it is unfolding; neither can Loktev. But their anxious faces and voices, and the filmmaker’s well-trained eyes and ears, are the instruments needed to tease it into view.
Julia Loktev was born in 1969 in Leningrad, in the former Soviet Union, and immigrated to the United States with her family at age nine. She was in her late twenties when she directed her first feature, the documentary “Moment of Impact” (1989), about the aftermath of a car accident in Colorado that left her father severely disabled. “My Undesirable Friends” is her first nonfiction work since then, but what unites all four of the features that she’s made is a uniquely heightened, almost obsessive quality of concentration—a willingness to play with repetition and duration, and to shake up the way we experience the passage of time. In “The Loneliest Planet,” her drama from 2012, Loktev follows a young couple (Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg) on a backpacking trip through the Caucasus Mountains, in Georgia. The journey proceeds slowly, with few hints of tension and nary a whisper of plot—until a single, wordless commingling of terror and betrayal, in which everything changes, never to be reversed. Loktev is a genius of tipping-point cinema, and her movies are made of such moments. But she knows that revelations must be earned, embedded in a clear framework, or a pattern, of narrative meaning. To appreciate the full moral weight and dramatic immensity of these moments means grasping the significance of the moments leading up to them—and the ones that come afterward. (Speaking of which: Loktev is already at work on a follow-up documentary, “My Undesirable Friends: Part II—Exile.”)
The effect of this approach in “Part I” is at once immersive and disorienting. Loktev, who edited the film with Michael Taylor, likes to linger on individual sequences for minutes on end, but within those sequences she sometimes cuts quickly ahead, isolating essential words and ideas, and fast-forwarding ruthlessly past filler—unless it captures her attention, in which case, of course, it ceases to be filler and is subsumed into the fabric of the characters’ waking reality. Will her sense of completism nag at you, even incline you toward boredom? It might, but even our moments of impatience accrue a meaningful layer of empathy. This is, in no small part, a film about what it means to wait—for a colleague to be released from a pointless, unjust detention, or for the world to finally come crashing down.
And as Nemzer and her friends wait, they give voice, reflexively, to a brand of gallows humor that journalists in the audience may well recognize. The characters muse about the extreme likelihood that their apartments have been bugged. They speak, with knowing grimaces, of the police practice of conducting raids early in the morning; one reporter laughs about once scrambling to change her clothes, horrified at the prospect of being detained without comfortable underwear. Some of the women take legal steps to challenge the “foreign agents” label; they also treat it as a punch line, mocking the disclaimers they must now append to their work and trying their best to downplay or ignore the social stigmatization that’s been forced upon them.
Even the darkest comic relief, of course, is an acknowledgment of danger, of warning signs ignored at one’s peril. And it’s in these warnings that “My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow” may reverberate most troublingly for viewers in Donald Trump’s America, seeming to depict a more advanced and perilous version of their own autocratic reality. The natural impulse to place ourselves in these characters’ shoes becomes all the more difficult—and frightening—once the war in Ukraine begins, sending Russia and this cluster of characters into free fall. Watching these characters as a writer (albeit not a reporter), I wondered what it would be like to not be able to call a war a war, or an invasion an invasion, and to be forced, instead, to use the government-approved term “military special operation.” You will wonder, too, how it would feel to have to pack up your belongings within a couple of hours, bid farewell to friends and family members (those you trust, anyway), and flee your home under cover of darkness.
“When will these dark times pass?” someone asks, at one point. “How much longer do we have to endure this?” Loktev’s accomplishment in this extraordinarily human cinematic document is to simply keep filming—to cling fast to her camera, and to keep it focussed on the remarkable sight of young people showing exemplary courage. In doing so, she keeps faith with the words of another speaker, pledging solidarity with dissidents everywhere: “Evil is not eternal, and truth will surely win.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
