Silent souls (2010)

Silent, agonized men have appeared on film before. Putting silent and agonized men (who are consoled by kind prostitutes from time to time) in ravishingly beautiful landscapes cannot save a film like Silent souls (dir. Aleksey Fedorchenko). OK, so Fedorchenko knows what he is doing. The film is visually pleasant and it is interesting to see a take on Meryan funeral rituals. But at the same time, I never started caring. I watched these sullen men in their car and I tried to tune in on their silence - without anything much opening up to me. The Meryan community has a connection with Finland but as the characters in the film said: the traditions are withering away. The film tries to zoom in on that loss but the result is, I felt, that the melancholy becomes so all-encompassing that the viewer is choked in it. The shell of the story is that a factory owner's wife dies and he asks a friend to go with him to perform a burial ritual. The film follows them on this sonorous journey with a dead body in the back-seat and two stoical men pondering life in the front seats.