Theatre, Creation, and Female Friendship in Vermelho Russo (Russian Red)
Vermelho Russo (Russian Red), Charly Braun (2016)
How do you slowly become something else? inquires a Russian theater professor to a group of international students sitting in a circle, immersed in learning Stanislavski's acting method. How do you become someone else without losing yourself in the process? These questions lie at the core of the professional and personal journey shared by two young Brazilian actresses— Marta (a wonderful Martha Nowill) and Manu (Maria Manoella)— during one very cold spring in Moscow. Charly Braun's second feature Vermelho Russo (Russian Red) beautifully explores the intimate, loving, and contentious connections these two friends have with acting and with each other, while discovering the urban landscape as well as Russian people, their theater, and their cinema.
Cinematographer Alexandre Samori's camera wanders across and closely observes the city through the eyes of these two young women who, instilled with curiosity and reverence, stroll around soviet-style buildings, monuments, squares. What they see and what we see in turn escapes the often exotic and stereotypical vistas we've been accustomed to through other films. Instead, this is the Russia of flea markets, parks, the subway, Dziga Vertov, and Chekhov.
Vermelho Russo (Russian Red), Charly Braun (2016)
In fact, Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya serves as a platform for the girlfriends' intense and vexed relationship. Incessantly rehearsing the scene of Yelena and Sonya's open confrontation, soaked in mutual anger, antagonism and subsequent reconciliation, the relevance of these blurred lines between life and performance becomes evident. The roles Marta and Manu have chosen to perform—the beautiful and self-assured Yelena, the sweet and insecure Sonya—accentuate the darkest aspects of their bond.
Acting and creation become aspects essential to life, while Russian cinema and theater are delicately portrayed. Braun choses to place the actors in a boarding house also inhabited by elders, who in their past were part of a fascinating but soon-forgotten world of Soviet cinema. An old lady Marta finds wandering the hallway had an important position in Mosfilm, the film production company that help produce Eisenstein and Tarkovsky masterpieces, among others. Svetlana, the smiling concierge, used to be a film actress.
Vermelho Russo (Russian Red), Charly Braun (2016)
One of the most alluring aspects of Vermelho Russo (Russian Red) is the palpable love that Braun displays for performance, and how he captures performance without formulas or clichés. When first confronted by her teacher and classmates about her decision to come to Russia, Marta explains she was tired of performing in plays in Brazil that had more people on stage than in the audience. The exoticism of the golden domes seen moments before vanishes and Brazil and Russia come closer as two cultures anchored by passionate and talented young men and women, who must yet fiercely struggle with their art and their lives. Is the world of state-sponsored artistic production gone—in both Russia and Brazil? The answer to this question does not seem to be a fundamental feature of Braun's film. There is no nostalgic glance towards the past.
Instead, Vermelho Russo (Russian Red) delves into the difficulties, pains, and the beauty of being young and passionate about just performing; loving friends, literature, theater and cinema and devoting your whole live to them in Russia or Brazil, in a very uncertain and imperfect world.
Vermelho Russo (Russian Red), Charly Braun (2016)