HAPPY DAYS, a film by Alexei Balabanov, starring Viktor Sukhorukov, inspired by the works of Samuel Beckett. Russia, 1992, 86 min, b/w.

"Extraordinarily well realised"  Time Out    See more reviews

"Visually striking" Philip French, Observer

"Keeps you watching even when you haven't the faintest understanding of what is going on" Edward Porter, The Sunday Times

Based on works by Samuel Beckett, Happy Days is the first feature by Alexei Balabanov, one of the most promising new European directors. His controversial films Brother and Of Freaks and Men have turned him into a cult director in Russia and brought him acclaim at international film festivals.

INDEX

•  About Alexei Balabanov

•  Alexei Balabaov's films

•  Viktor Sukhorukov, the star of Happy Days and other Alexei Balabanov films on his work with Alexei Balabanov

•  Reviews from Time Out, The Independent on Sunday and Night Waves, BBC3

 

ABOUT ALEXEI BALABANOV

'Balabanov is one of the world's great contemporary film-makers'

The Independent

 

Alexei Balabanov came to film-making in 1987, when he undertook the Higher Course in Film Directing and Scriptwriting at the renowned State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, at the age of 28. Born in Sverdlovsk in the Urals in 1959, he graduated in Modern Languages, then served as a military interpreter in Africa and the Middle East. He subsequently returned to Sverdlovsk, where he worked as an assistant director at the Sverdlovsk Film Studio.

After graduating from film school, he spent a brief period directing documentary before settling in St. Petersburg to join the New Russian Cinema movement at the Lenfilm Studio.

Balabanov immediately impressed critics at Cannes in 1992 with his feature film debut, Happy Days, which won five national awards. In 1995 his short, Trofim, won the Message to Man award for Best Short Feature.

His stylish thriller, Brother, was Russia's biggest box office hit of 1997. It was awarded the Second Prix and Fipressi at the Torino Film Festival, and was screened at Cannes and at the London Film Festival. Sergei Bodrov was awarded Best Actor at the Chicago Film Festival for his role, and the film was released in the USA and Europe.

Balabanov's 1998 feature Of Freaks and Men was presented at Cannes. Actress Dinara Drukarova was nominated as Best European Actress. The film has received national awards for photography, sound and Best Director for Alexei Balabanov.

Balabanov has just finished filming English-language Brother-2 which is due for completion in April 2000. Brother-2 follows the protagonist of Brother on his trip to America.

 

 

VIKTOR SUKHORUKOV, THE STAR OF HAPPY DAYS AND OTHER ALEXEI BALABANOV FILMS ON HIS WORK WITH ALEXEI BALABANOV

He is the most complex type of a natural phenomenon: an explosive mixture of childishness with cynicism, stubbornness with naiveté, worrying and indifference. He has a good house and his beautiful kids are running around. He keeps losing his scarves, hats, gloves, and smashing his elbows when he falls off his bicycle.

He loves his job and he loves himself doing it. For serving the art of cinema, he is awarded with loneliness, reclusiveness, unsociability, emotional scantiness and a noticeable lack of attention to people around him. He is an egotist. A smile on his face is a rarity. I have never seen tears in his eyes. He seldom complains about his destiny, but he is not often happy either and he doesn't share his success even with those who were involved.

He is not a man of many words. Sometimes he literally shows the right intonation to actors and on other occasions he shows it by gesturing like in sign language. He makes me think and work hard to understand him. It's good training for me, a sort of exercise for the intuition.

If he is dissatisfied with something, he can be on a short fuse. I am ready for it and take it easy. I forgive him for this, because while working, he can listen to you. He cannot swear at all. To be exact, he swears but in a clumsy way. And not too often. He is more likely to say out loud: "Cut! Filming is over!" and then go round the corner and say: "Bloody bastard, ruined the shot!"

It's pointless to wait for him to praise you. When he is pleased he rubs one hand against the other and inclines his head to the left, then to the right looking at the world diagonally. It's the first sign.

He has his own fantasies and an arsenal of means which he employs to get the best out of an actor. For example, a provocation. While working on Happy Days, he made me wear shoes half a size smaller, very tight. We were filming in winter, in a cemetery - my legs were frost-bitten. I told him "My legs are freezing". Said he: "It's alright, try to put up with it." Later it turned out to have been done on purpose - he wanted my suffering to come out in the expression of my eyes.

Balabanov of Happy Days and Balabanov today are two different people. He got upset with me for calling him a 'hedgehog' in one of my old interviews. But he did look like a hedgehog in those days. His eyes were those of a frightened child. He was modest and kept looking around him nervously. Now he is different. He's grown long hair though he has lost some on the crown of his head. Most importantly, he has changed inside. He has started holding his shoulders back and gained confidence. He says: "I don't need actors to play, I need them to be present". At first he was shaving off my theatricality. Then I got used to him and began to feel what he wants better. When making Of Freaks and Men, I felt there were not enough emotions, I wanted either to burst into laughter or smack my lips. Once I was brave enough to tell him: "Let me add a bit of fire here". He said: "No". He keeps putting the fire out in me, all the time.

Despite all this I am glad I have been an object of his creative work. Every actor dreams of coming across a director he could call 'mine'. I know, he will never let me down, make me feel ashamed or do anything bad to me. He can behave in a strange way and can be complicated or even pretentious and over-elaborate with me. But he never does anything bad.

Alright, I am just an actor while his films are shown around the world and were selected for Cannes three times... But he never was arrogant with me, I just didn't let him. Perhaps, he is a little afraid of me - I don't know.

... It's hard and interesting for me to work with him; and I trust him. As long as Balabanov keeps calling me into the world of the art of cinema, I am ready to answer and work with him. I will live with a hope of success. And of course, I won't betray him. And should he dig out another 'sukhorukov' and I, with my bald head, be left behind - I will be upset but not offended.

Translated from Seance, film journal, St. Petersburg

 

REVIEWS

•  Time Out
•  The Independent on Sunday
•  Night Waves, BBC3

Wally Hammond writes in TIME OUT:

This debut feature from festival discovery Alexei Balabanov could be described as a purgatorial allegory - whether for man or Russia, it's hard to say. As idiosyncratic as his later and soon-to-be-released 'Of Freaks and Men', it takes its inspiration from Samuel Beckett. A character named Peter, Sergei or even possibly Boris (Viktor Sukhorukov), his head wrapped in bandages since his release from hospital (this earth?) roams the decaying flats, cellars and cemeteries bordering St Petersbug's Winter Palace square, in search of somewhere to stay.

Balabanov made a faithful version of 'The Castle' in 1994, and that has left a greater mark: here he conjures up a world of Kafkaesque hostility and minatory mystery where only a blind man with a donkey and a fallen aristocratic woman offer the protagonist any amicable communicative signs. Could these be ironic reminders of the balms of religion or the lost certainties of the old social order? For sure, if his wanderings through these remains, relics and ruins are through a modern Russia, it must be some kind of madhouse.

The director employs black and white most expressively, whether in exquisite gliding crane shots swooping you up from decrepit cellar arches to discover the grand snowy vista of the palace square, or in claustrophobically framed dark interiors, where the camera will often alight and pause, affectingly, on an object - a dancing-ballerina jewel box - before moving on. Similarly, his mood effects are emphasised by canny use of discordant, non-naturalistic sound and old 78 records. This is an extraordinarily well realised doom-lover's playground, the oneiric existential gloom making way only for Svankmajer-like surrealism. Ontology, anyone?

 

Antonia Quirke writes in THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY:

Disorientating and memorable, the film has lines which are weirdly reminiscent of sketches from Beyond the Fringe. He: "Give me a potty!" She: "I don't have a potty. But I have a chair with a hole in it"

 

Extracts on 'HAPPY DAYS' and 'BROTHER' from NIGHT WAVES, BBC3

Presenter: The film is shot in gritty black and white for all the world like a low-budget film but the highly stylised soundtrack and a quite remarkable camera work - one single long take starts at ground level, rises above roof tops and descends to street level on the other side - give it away as a film that must have had reasonably serious budget.

The hero who doesn't remember his own name and is given several by other characters as the film progresses, has suffered a head injury. The film begins as he is about to be discharged from hospital into a strange, cold and rather nightmarish city. I could continue with the plot but it might be more useful to tell you that the film is subtitled 'Inspired by the works of Samuel Beckett'. So the plot isn't very much help. It's less of a story line and more of a string of episodes with recurring character, who include a child who might or might not be the protagonist's son, a spitting dwarf, a donkey, a prostitute and, why not? - a hedgehog.

Birgit Beumers teaches Russian at Bristol University and is an expert on the work of Alexei Balabanov. Birgit, this is Beckett, if you like without the humour, is it not? It's a very grim film about futility of life and the meaninglessness of relationships that appeared just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. How was it received? Was it read as a political metaphor in any way?

Birgit Beumers: Yes, that's right, it was produced at a time when the Soviet Union was collapsing and with it also the film industry and the structures that had supported filmmakers for such a long time and had in fact always given filmmakers the role of missionaries, of prophets who would inspire moral and educational values in the population.

What the film does in retrospect - it gives us a great many clues to the work of Alexei Balabanov and his contemporary work: the two last films that he has made. That is Of Freaks and Men and Brother.

Presenter: As you say he went on to make other films, and particularly Brother, which became a huge success in Russia and was also very well noticed and well received in the West: prizes at film festivals and so on. But it's very different, is it not?

Birgit: Yes, it is very different and yet again it is very much an echo of the images, the place and the time that we find in Happy Days. It is striking to see the similarity of locations such as the cemetery, the empty tram in a film that is about the meaninglessness of life and that is associated with the work of Samuel Beckett, and to find these images, these places again in a film which became a cult film in Russia, to find them in a film which is set very clearly in contemporary St. Petersburg, in a film which deals with a life of a killer. I think the connection between the two films lies in Balabanov's concern with meaninglessness, with absences, with the emptiness of the life of the hero from Happy Days as well as the emptiness in the life of a young boy who moves from a provincial city to St. Petersburg and becomes a killer.
Presenter: Is he unusual in that sense? You mentioned the question of moral purpose of previous generations of Russian filmmakers. He was criticised for not taking a more positive / negative stand about the killer in Brother. Is his generation like that or is he unusual in his generation?

Birgit: Balabanov is very unusual in that disengagement that he shows with the themes that he chooses for his films, that he does not only portray the emptiness, the meaninglessness, but he leaves it at that. He frames it but he doesn't offer a solution. He frames it very skilfully, but he always moves the frame slightly so that whatever grid you place over one film or over a series of films, there is always one thing that doesn't quite fit in. And I think that is exactly what Balabanov's role in contemporary Russian filmmaking is. That is that bit which always sticks out, which doesn't fit in.

Presenter: Where do you see him in the tradition of the Russian filmmaking?

Birgit: I would see him as somebody who uses certain traditions and conventions of cinematography, but world cinematography rather than typically Russian or Soviet cinematography. I see him as a front runner of some new developments in contemporary Russian cinema.

Presenter: And given the collapse of the Russian state, is it possible for a filmmaker like Balabanov to work in his own country? I noticed that the sequel to Brother is being made in the United States, which might be a function of the plot, but might also have something to do with what has happened to the industry.

Birgit: That's a very tricky question. The film industry suffered greatly after the economic crisis in August 1998, but to everybody's great surprise films are still being made. And the fact that Balabanov is shooting Brother-2 in a co-production with the United States is very much an achievement of the producer he is working with and that is Sergei Selyanov.