MEMORABILIA. СОБРАНИЕ ПАМЯТНЫХ ВЕЩЕЙ

n modern-day Russia, if someone dressed impeccably in a long black coat and who you've never seen before comes up to you and asks you to work for a group of people who have vast power and are about to reassert their presence in society, you'd have to be suspicious of their intentions. In Ekaterina Kharlamova's Memorabilia—sobranie pamjaatnykh veshchei (Memorabilia—A Collection of Memorable Things, 2001), this is what befalls Evgeny Stogov, a young actor (played with a gentle but firm screen presence by Romulad Makarov) currently preparing for a production of Hamlet who pretends he's more distinguished than he really is. The mysterious group want Evgeni to be a public face for their activities, and it's an offer he's told he shouldn't refuse. Evgeny asks for time to think, consulting his girlfriend, who spookily turns out to have been in on the organisation all along, and a ghostly presence in his mirror to try and find the answers to the dilemma.
　　As Evgeny contemplates the issue, Kharlamova takes us into stylised, colourful tableaux, representating processes of thought and perception and the gap between what Evgeni is and what he pretends to be. The film's big joke, played out across three endings in the capricious spirit of the whole feature, is that the messenger does not represent the mafia at all and may not even exist. It's not quite worth the 96-minute wait to find out the identity of those behind the offer and whether Evgeni takes it up. However, the half whimsical, half philosphical approach and interest in games and the game-like structures of life is a novel and refreshing style, and is reminiscent of the rather more convincing but still under-rated Iady, ili Vsemirnaia istoriia otravlenii (Poisons or a World History of Poisoning, 2001), Karen Shakhnazarov's film that played in competition at Karlovy Vary last year.
　　Memorabilia is a beautiful and intriguing film, though, and a charming exploration of the potentially cliched topic of memory and perception. It's also a work that has much individuality without being offensively egotistical. It's not a film to take the world by storm, but this is only Kharlamova's second feature and, if she can mature from this current command of cinematic language, her future films could well be sparkling gems of humour, observation, fantasy and reflection.