The Never-ending Story

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              "text": "Soviet era-inspired sculptures within the complex where the film <em>Dau</em> is being made.",
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              "text": "While the Brutalist style had its reign over Soviet design and architecture, it was never set in the company of the avant-garde, as it is here—black, powder-coated streetlamps with muscled arms. Khrzhanovsky seems to have juxtaposed his love of camp with a desire to be faithful to historicity.",
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              "text": "The set in <em>Dau</em> is that of an imaginary city—a city according to Khrzhanovsky’s idea of what an urban society riddled with Stalinist suspicion and grimness must have been like. The architecture is not necessarily faithful to those times, and the actors seem to be working—or living their false but real quotidian lives—for the sake of remaining true to the director’s directive that they must. This is method acting taken to its farthest extreme.",
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              "text": "In the absence of simple cash machines, cafeterias used the flat abacus to make lightning-fast calculations. The abacus ensured both speed and accuracy, useful in a time when cafeteria workers were constantly in fear of raids by the ferocious workers’ commissariat known as Rabkin, dedicated to ferreting out and punishing discrepancies of even a few kopeck.",
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              "text": "Khrzhanovsky keeps dossiers of his cast, from the time they arrived for the interview to the moment of their conversion into living ghosts of Stalinism past.",
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              "text": "Viktoria morphs from an attractive New Age-ish housewife into a dowdy establishment matron-withpowers— except that she plays one of Landau’s physicists. The conversion is stunning, and it perhaps explains why Khrzhanovsky turns an uncharacteristic blind eye to the sartorial independence of his wardrobe department while insisting that everybody else march to his tune.",
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              "text": "Dressers in the wardrobe department attend to a potential crowd extra’s costume. The dressers themselves seem to be spared apparel restrictions; they are some of the most crucial cogs in Khrzhanovsky’s plans.",
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              "text": "Viktoria, who plays a physicist in <em>Dau</em>, gets dressed for her role.",
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              "text": "A waitress adds up the earning in a cafeteria that looks like the real 1950s-60s thing, and serves the same hard-to-get bread-and-potatoes inventions. All the food is from the Soviet-era as are all the props, including money, whether it is to be filmed or not. Indeed, Soviet-era money is the only currency allowed within The Institute.",
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              "text": "Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky on set. He is known to interview potential female cast members with questions like “Can you come up to a guy in a club and sleep with him without finding out as much as his name?”, or “Are any of your friends whores?”",
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              "text": "Photographer Sergey Maximishin and writer Michael Idov are being readied for their visit to the set of <em>Dau</em>. Maximishin’s digital camera has been camouflaged by a black skirt meant to hide its digital identity. Idov wears a hairnet.",
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ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE DRAB, industrial city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, a vast wooden box spills out of a three-storey brick building that houses The Institute, a film set that is trying hard to be a perfect replica of a 1950s-1960s Soviet city.

The Institute is the brainchild of the 37-year-old enfant terrible director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, an unruly-mopped, bespectacled, anarchic and flamboyantly imperious scion of a film family, who has so far managed to convince enough European investors to bankroll his brutal and baroque movie project/human experiment that has been in the making since 2006.

The actors live their roles day and night, literally: the heavy serge clothes, the slop pretending to be food, the grey, suspicious, furtive drone look of the reluctant stalinista. Anybody found balking at or trying to buck the historical dynamics of this time-warp is fined 1,000 hryvnia (about $12 3.5) and often flat-out fired.

Even the photographer of this essay had to leave most of  his digital accessories—including his mobile phone—behind at the gates of the gloom-palled ‘set’. After the wardrobe folks had remodelled him (visitors are also incorporated into Khrzhanosvky’s dystopian spacetime distortion), he emerged looking like a Taynoy politsii (secret police) in a trenchcoat and a Homburg—all in black.

The film is titled Dau, which is what the devoted students of Lev Davidovich Landau (1908-68), an Azerbaijan-born Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, called him. Landau changed the world of quantum mechanics studies with his findings on superfluidity and quantum thermodynamics. A fornication machine with a genius’s brain attached to it, he was also the author of a stunning leaflet that the KGB declassified only in 1991: the tract, dated 1938, was one of just three explicit denunciations of Stalin during the Great Purge.

History teems with auteurs who push the lines of control with their projects. Francis Ford Coppola shot his momentous Apocalypse Now (1979) in 238 delirious days in the deepest Philippines, giving Martin Sheen a heart attack in the process. Stanley Kubrick appropriated Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman body and soul for 15 months without a break for Eyes Wide Shut (1999), working himself so hard that a heart attack killed him days before the film’s release. Khrzhanovsky is just eight months from Dau’s scheduled release at L’Atelier du Festival at Cannes in May 2013; and with just a single award-winning feature film—Chetyre (or 4; 2005)—to his name. How he plans to cut-and-splice six years of random shooting into a film is anybody’s guess. But whether the film wins the Palme d’Or or blows Khrzhanovsky’s reputation into the weeds, it’ll have been an Event.