Twilight Portrait (2011)

(Portret v sumer kakh)

Directed by: Angelina Nikonova

Marina (Olga Dihovichnay, who co-wrote the story), a beautiful, middle-class social worker with a moderately unhappy marriage, is raped by three policeman after she seeks help when her bag is stolen.  Combined with all the cruelty she sees at work, and the petty nastiness she perceives in friends and strangers alike, she experiences a kind of catharsis – but exactly what kind is it?

In the days after the rape, she unloads all her resentment at friends and family, starts stalking one of the policeman who’d raped her – and then begins an affair with him.  At first she seems to be – indeed, she is – trying to take revenge.

But Nikonova keeps subverting our expectations.  Whenever she has the opportunity to hurt him, she expresses love for him instead.

Crazy times call for crazy solutions.  Life in the unnamed Russian city (it was actually filmed in Rostov) is depicted as so miserably bleak that anyone might go mad.  But Marina is deploying her skills as a social worker, trying to reach out to even the most hardened case.  As an exercise in turning the other cheek (literally, at one point) no one could accuse Marina of not giving her all.  By the end she may be getting somewhere, though her efforts are not all successful.

In the end, the movie carries a message of hope, though it is unusually well-disguised – Nikonova’s style could reasonably be described as opaque.  It also privileges Marina’s position a little more than is necessary: no other character in the movie really comes off better than pathetic, and many are closer to the evil end of the scale.  Not an easy watch, nor one that you could describe as enjoyable.  But it does stay in your mind more than most.