Cinema Monday: Compartment n.6, a film that grabs you and that you never want to leave

The initiative continues on Monday 13 May Cinema Monday edited by Republic And MYmovies for quality cinema streaming. A virtual cinema room ready to welcome MYmovies ONE members with a refined selection of titles to be seen (or re-watched) strictly together from 8pm to midnight.

Great life stories and current affairs, for those who love entertainment, great shows and discussions after watching.

For the third appointment on Monday 13 May, Republic with Bim Distribution present Compartment n.6 (book a seat for free), the film by Juho Kuosmanen which won at Cannes on Special Jury Grand Prix, and which won the protagonist Seidi Haarla the Shooting Stars Award in Berlin. A film that grips you, minute after minute, where every second lets you grasp the progressive shifts of the protagonists and their hesitant approach. And we get to the end that you would like to see again, you would like to be with them againwith those two cold souls.

Two unknown actors, an unadorned train compartment in the snow. Outside the window, storm and darkness. Inside, two strangers: a boy with a shaved head smokes, drinks and looks like a wild animal. And a girl, on that night train, in the 90s, between Moscow and the end of the world. Well, it doesn’t seem like much to outline an interesting film: they’re not even that good, those two. It’s not like in a Hitchcock film, where she is blonde and fatal, and he is Cary Grant. And he’s not either From Russia with love, that night train full of spies, where Sean Connery kills in a suit and tie, mends his ways and returns to his Bond girl. No, here I am two crumpled soulslost in a train compartment where you seem to feel the cold in the windows and the unhealthy, feverish heat of an uneven heating, while the train slips through the snow and darkness.

But no. The film involves you. Even if that compartment, at the beginning, is so gloomy, even if it resembles the cell of a maximum security prison more than the wagon-lits of classic cinema. Slowly the dim light comes on, then becomes increasingly stronger of a story.

There are few words, and everything is understood. From the beginning: a dinner of intellectuals, in Moscow. A girl comes out of the bathroom, she is embarrassed, she doesn’t know anyone. She participates in a cultured conversation, there is a quote to guess. They look at her. She throws in: “Anna Akhmatova?”. No, it’s Marilyn Monroe. And she even mispronounced her name. It’s called “Achmatova”, one of the boys at the party points out. It takes very little, nothing is enough, to feel on the edge of everything.

The girl – Seidi Haarla – is Finnish, she is awkward with Russian, with gestures, even with her own body. She has an affair with the leader of that intellectual salon: they were supposed to leave together the next day for a remote city, Murmansk, above the Arctic Circle, one of the most northern cities in the world. But at the last moment she discovers that she has to go alone: ​​her partner has to work. And she finds herself on that train, in front of a stranger who drinks poor quality alcohol, eats a sausage rudely. And he asks her, without too many compliments: “What are you doing on this train? Do you sell the f…?”.

Not the best of starts. In the carriage, empty as the inside of a missile, there is only the sleeper, with her vaguely hostile attitude, of whom you can ask, at most, a tea bag.

Well? At that time, why is this film worth seeing? Because every second shows the progressive shifts of their orbits. It makes you feel every millimeter of their hesitant approach. Because he makes everything clear, and doesn’t use words. Because you also get attached to that train, which stops for hours on end, like a tired animal. Because you phone the woman in Moscow, she wants to come back. But she understands that she has nothing and no one to return to.

At one stop, in a gloomy city called Petrozavodsk, we enter the house of an old woman. They are there, drinking bad alcohol, and the woman says to the girl: “To be happy, you have to follow the animal within you, you have to listen to it”. The film also seems to follow her animal, her instinct, rather than the obligatory points of a script. She clings to cigarettes, to looks. The snow, the tracks, the lights in the darkness of houses glimpsed from a train.

It happens little. Yet, as the film approaches the end, you would like to see more, you would like to be with them again, with those two cold souls. Two people both out of place, going to a place that couldn’t be more out of place. Murmansk, average annual temperatures of zero degrees, peaks of -39°, stories of heroism during the Second World War, and somewhere the petroglyphs. Prehistoric stone engravings. The girl should have seen them together with the other one, the woman from the living rooms. But now, alone, she no longer seems to make sense. And the film tells us exactly this: how life can suddenly lose meaning. And how, equally miraculously, he can regain it. Because we are strange animals, we drink at random, and that water is surprisingly good.

It is not surprising, in the end, that Compartment n.6 won at Cannes Special Jury Grand Prix, and made the protagonist Seidi Haarla win the Shooting Stars Award in Berlin. Watch it, and if possible in the original, with subtitles. In any case, they speak very little.