In the early 80s, as a child, Nika Turbina became a famous poetess, and the fame of a wonderful girl thundered throughout the Soviet Union. In the early 2000s, 27-year-old Nika (Liza Yankovskaya, known for the TV series The Lost and the film The Story of One Appointment) hasn’t written poetry for a long time, doesn’t work anywhere, has problems with alcohol and endlessly bickers with her mother (Anna Mikhalkova, known for the films “The Barber of Siberia” and “Playing the Victim”), with whom he lives in a cramped Khrushchev.
Nika Turbina is a real historical person, a poetess girl who published her first collection of poems in 1983 when she was 8 years old. Nika was patronized by Julian Semyonov and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, at the age of 10 she participated in the poetry festival at the Venice Biennale and received the Golden Lion there, and her whole future life was a series of failures and breakdowns. The film reproduces some circumstances of her biography with unexpected and even excessive accuracy, and, of course, sacrifices some for the sake of artistic expediency. Nevertheless, Nika is still not a biopic: although the film tells the story of a real person, it deviates quite far from the traditional genre structure of biopics. The accents are different here, and the plot depicts only a few months from the life of the heroine.
The picture of the young director Vasilisa Kuzmina (known for the series “Alisa” and “Infuriates”), staged according to the script written by her together with Yulia Gulyan (known as a screenwriter who worked on two “Christmas Trees”), begins with black-and-white shots from the 1983 documentary about Nika Turbina. The little poetess, with cloying theatrical antics, speaks of herself in obviously memorized phrases: “poems fly to me like a rider on a horse”, “my mother and I have one heart for two.” In this epigraph, all the main themes of the film are already stated: the hopeless falsehood, and the toxic relationship with the mother, and the problem of the authorship of Nika’s poems (it was suspected that their mother wrote them, that’s why they are so “adults”), and the self-perception of a person who was inspired in childhood, that he is a genius and he will succeed, but the reality turned out to be a little more complicated.
Before us, in general, is the story of a man who did not justify his hopes, especially his own. And now, at 27, in the midst of total hopelessness, she is trying to find support in order to somehow live on. All external events are important here only insofar as they are reflected in the experiences of the heroine. While admission to VGIK is important for Nika, the plot intrigue with entrance exams pushes everything else into the background. As soon as this ceases to be important for the heroine, the topic of VGIK leaves the story, and we are not even really told how it ended there (in reality, however, Nika entered and even studied for a year in the workshop of Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, and then she got tired).
Film frame
Building the plot not so much external as internal, psychological, Vasilisa Kuzmina relies on expression and anguish. The game of Lisa Yankovskaya, an actress with a low voice and an unkind face, is subordinated to this goal, who plays here a person tense like a string and constantly balancing on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
The same goal is pursued by the manner of narration with bold montage both within individual scenes and between them. It is not known, for example, how much time passed between the first and second meetings with the boyfriend Igor imposed on his mother (Evgeny Sangadzhiev, actor of the Gogol Center, known for the films The Man from Podolsk and Brest Fortress): the events are shown end to end, and you might think that several hours passed between them, and it is possible that several months. Kuzmina does not want to confuse the viewer at all: she allows plot ambiguities only where the lack of clarity does not interfere with understanding the plot. Subordinating her story to the requirements of expression, she seeks not so much to present the story in detail as to create an emotionally dense image of the timelessness that Nika’s adult life has become.
You can also praise the acting duet of Lisa Yankovskaya and Anna Mikhalkova. The relationship between their characters turns out to be somewhat more complicated than the expected patterns (“selfish mother and victim-daughter” or “holy mother and dissolute daughter”), and Mikhalkova manages to create an ambiguous image open to interpretation.
Film frame
Characteristic of “Nika” and some generic sores of Russian cinema. Every time when domestic filmmakers want to reconstruct the recent historical past, it becomes like nostalgic publics on social networks. Drawing the beginning of the 2000s, Kuzmina bombards the viewer with so many artifacts of that time – posters with Ilya Lagutenko, night stalls, long leather jackets, “Fight Club” in cinemas – that already at the 15th minute you want to ask for mercy. But the bombardment continues, and when, in the middle of the film, the hero shows a Harry Potter book (just translated and not yet known to anyone) with meaning, it becomes clear that there will be no mercy.
Perhaps due to copyright issues or for some other reason, Nika Turbina’s poems do not sound in the film, and other poets’ poems sound as examples of her work. Let it be so, but still it is not clear why the authors replaced Nikina’s poems with their simple poetics with poems so dissimilar, frankly adult and with a lexicon too rich even for a very gifted eight-year-old child.
Film frame
In general, Nika is a movie where every hope is followed by despair step by step, every joyful smile is followed by an evil hysteria, and those who know how Nika Turbina’s life ended know that a happy ending should not be expected here . Starting as a story about a real ex-poet, “Nika” quickly acquires the features of a generalization and becomes a poignant dedication to all those lost in this damned complicated life.
A viewer who appreciates smart non-trivial films, good acting and stories about doom, Nika should like it. Even if he did not write poetry in his life and more than justified all the expectations placed on him in childhood.