Of Freaks And Men (1998) |  Dir. Alexei Balabanov

Of Freaks and Men

Peter Bradshaw: A disturbing, erotically creepy, funny and touching film whose images will live in your memory... This is a film of pungent and distinctive flavour, maybe not to all tastes; but, for its originality and style, it must be seen.

Of Freaks and Men (1998) |  dir. Alexei Balabanov

... Shot in a glittering, wintry monochrome, which attains a heavy sepia tint, Of Freaks and Men is set in turn-of-the-century St Petersburg. It imagines the bourgeois origins of Russia's fledgling porn industry: specifically that catering for images of flagellation and sado-masochism - catching this industry on the cusp of its movement from still photography to rudimentary moving pictures. The film's periodic silent-movie captions and its daguerreotype-hue are in homage to both media... What is most striking about this disturbingly dark satire is Astakhov's masterly cinematography, which not only evokes the primitive photography look of the era, but suggests the passing of an age of innocence, when weakness and trust were not rewarded with abuse and degradation...

The weird rapture of the beatings, which are first photographed, and then filmed, are overlaid with a sadness and an absurdity...

Balabanov's proto-Freudian bad dream Of Freaks and Men stands out as a compelling experience, sinuously original and deeply refreshing - although refreshing is perhaps not the exact word for this uniquely unsettling movie. Balabanov's brutal study of modern Russian gangsterism, Brother, is already on release here, and now this director's later picture marks him out as a distinctive and very remarkable talent.

There is something very gamey and very kinky in the way Balabanov represents the consumers of Johann's wares as being women, and this conceit has its own element of pornographic whimsy. Balabanov's juxtaposition of pornography with the trim, prim world of stage performance and bourgeois musical taste - in the form of Tolya and Kolya's sensational career on the stage - endows this secret theatre of sexuality with a vulnerability and a terrible pathos.

The weird rapture of the beatings, which are first photographed, and then filmed, are overlaid with a sadness and an absurdity as Balabanov reveals the emotional relationship that exists between Johann and the old woman - "nanny" - who is wheeled out on camera to administer the punishment.

Balabanov's St Petersburg is shown as having something in common with Arthur Schnitzler's Vienna, in which heavily furnished front parlours, upright pianos, mob-capped maids and antimacassars are the primal scenes for unacknowledged yearnings and sexual awakenings, both real and imagined. In Of Freaks and Men, Balabanov parodically invents a kind of prehistory of pornography, or a prehistory of sexual modernity: a deadpan world of suppression, displacement and exclusion in which nameless desires have an intensity for being hidden, but also a mortal and overwhelming sadness.

Of Freaks and Men is close to early David Lynch in its grotesqueness and Balabanov's images are faintly reminiscent of the photographs of Diane Arbus, with a suggestion of Joel-Peter Witkin, though they have always the solvent of tenderness. And, as in Balabanov's early movie Happy Days (released here last year), the bowler-hatted Johann and Victor have Beckettian severity and absurdity...