Aist (Igor Sergeev) lives in a region of Russia which used to be home to a tribe hailing from Scandinavia, the Merjan people, though they were gradually assimilated into the wider culture so that their customs and language died out. However, some still identify with the old ways, and when Aist hears from his friend Miron (Yuriy Tsurilo) that his wife Tanya (Yuliya Aug) has died suddenly, those old customs make a brief resurgence for Miron wishes to carry out the ancient death rites that have almost disappeared from the land. So off they set, with Aist's new pet buntings in a cage between them...
Though not before they wash and prepare the corpse, a scene shown with a single camera shot which will either test the patience or make you uncomfortable. The filmmakers didn't use an actual corpse of course, they used the actress playing Tanya, but the further this goes on the more you wonder if the rituals we see the two men carrying out, which include tying coloured threads to her pubic hair, are genuine or what director Aleksey Fedorchenko and his screenwriter Denis Osokin had invented for their movie. Were they, in fact pulling our leg when they had Miron share intimate secrets of his sex life with Tanya because that was traditional too?
There were hints of a sense of humour at play in Silent Souls, or Ovsyanki as it was known in Russian, but it was more bred of an atmosphere of strangeness, an alien tone for anybody who wasn't privy to the culture depicted. That could easily be offputting for much of the potential audience, but the philosophising Aist offers us in voiceover, relating to his own family including his poet father, was so po-faced that you could very well be watching a spoof. This inscrutability wasn't entirely a wall constructed to keep the uninitiated out, although that could be a result of it, but alternatively it could only pique the interest in trying to fathom quite what they were all getting at.
For a start, you find it difficult to believe that instead of disposing of a body through official means these two middle aged blokes would be allowed to spirit it away in the back of the car, drive it to a particular stretch of river then set fire to it, even if this was a revered ritual, but then it comes across as so remote and isolated that on further thought you see they probably could get away with that behaviour. As played out in the film, it's all about paying tribute to the deceased, who both men loved in their ways, though Aist never had a chance to consummate that attraction, yet Miron did have, as we see in flashback, a curious method of showing his affection, unless washing your beloved in vodka is normal in Russia.
I mean, we know they like their national tipple, but wouldn't they frown upon it being poured over someone if you were not going to drink it afterwards, and afterwards who would want to? That suspicion Federchenko was taking the Mickey didn't necessarily lend itself to outright dismissal of the work in hand, as it brought a mystery to the proceedings that could be quite entertaining in its eccentric fashion. It also didn't negate the sense of sincere love for someone who has passed away, although we do note that after they've carried out the act of tribute and disposed of the ashes they don't waste any time in picking up a couple of other women and having it off with them in a hotel room. Grief is a funny thing, one supposes, and that may be the point as the duo behave in very strange ways, apparently with the endorsement of centuries of tradtion, if indeed those were on the level and the filmmakers were not letting their imaginations run wild. Silent Souls was slow but short, and almost diverting despite its monolithic Russian temperament. Folk-style music by Andrei Karasyov.
