Celebrated for his passionate and politically charged reflections on Russian historical, cultural, and intellectual life, Russian auteur Kirill Serebrennikov dives headfirst into the chaos and contradiction of a shape-shifting ideologue in “Limonov: The Ballad.”
Serebrennikov’s first English-language feature is perhaps his most complicated to date, studying the stranger-than-fiction life of Eduard Limonov, a Russian punk-poet and political dissident who initially fought for purchase—if not purpose—in the Soviet underground before absconding to Manhattan, where he loitered in poverty and became a multimillionaire’s butler. Then, he traveled on to Paris, where he finally found fame in French literary circles before returning to Russia and founding the National Bolshevik Party, a violent neo-fascist group. Through it all, Serebrennikov’s film posits that Limonov remained true to one principle above all others: his own unassailable greatness.
Portrayed by English actor Ben Whishaw as a whirling dervish of energy and ego, prone to eruptions of jealous rage and petty insecurity, the character is alternately a bohemian bon vivant, a born provocateur, and a psychosexual animal. And through his relationships with first wife Anna (Maria Mashkova), a fixture of the Soviet literary scene, and second wife Elena (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), a socialite and model, “Limonov” draws particular focus to the ways his descent into emotional violence hastened an embrace of fascism. The film starts streaming this month on the Criterion Channel as part of “Starring Ben Whishaw,” a new collection celebrating the actor’s riveting body of work.
Born in the Soviet Union as Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko, he later adopted the pen name Limonov from “limonka,” the Soviet nickname for an F1 hand grenade. He saw himself as a perpetual underdog, aligned with anarchism above any other, more stable position. That he retained this conviction whilst careening from radical to reactionary is one reason he remains a figure of fascination for many, including Serebrennikov and Emmanuel Carrère, a French writer whose pseudo-biographical Limonov served as the film’s source material.
One would be ill-advised to read Carrère’s account seriously; subtitled The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, A Sensation in France, and A Political Antihero in Russia, its extended profile of Limonov is less biography than an alternately dutiful and dubious encounter with his mythology. Based on fictionalized memoirs and written in a rollicking present tense that favors intrigue over analysis, it takes a career fabulist at his word.
With his screenplay co-credited to Paweł Pawlikowski (“Cold War”) and Ben Hopkins (“Lost in Karastan”), Serebrennikov’s film is even further distanced from any claim to objectivity, with the filmmaker grappling with what he calls “the enigma of Eddie” across a sweeping, gleefully uninhibited swath of the 20th century’s latter half.
Extending the expressive surrealism of his previous films “Petrov’s Flu” and “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” both of which hit similarly strange and sour notes in their dreamlike tours of a Soviet yesteryear where nostalgia only induces madness (and vice versa), “Limonov” is not an ode to its subject but a delirious cinematic fugue unfurling from him, set somewhere between history and his story.
An acclaimed theatre, opera, and ballet director who served for nine years as the artistic director for Moscow’s avant-garde Gogol Centre before its closure by Russian authorities, Serebrennikov often mounted productions that critiqued the role of the church and state in Russian society, a satirical focus that earned him both fans and detractors in the Russian establishment.
A staunch critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Serebrennikov spent two years under house arrest in Moscow on trumped-up charges of fraud and embezzlement, in a case seen as indicative of wider crackdowns on artistic freedom; after invading Ukraine, the Kremlin stepped up such attacks, causing Serebrennikov to leave Russia.
Now based in Berlin, Serebrennikov has found a more receptive audience for his politically vivid, formally daring cinema in France, where the Cannes Film Festival has screened his five most recent features, also including “Leto,” set in ’80s Leningrad’s underground punk-rock scene, and “The Student,” about a young man falling into religious extremism in Russia.
While in the south of France at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where “Limonov” competed for the Palme d’Or in the festival’s main-competition section, Serebrennikov sat down to discuss the self-definition of Russian dissidents, the heightened poetics of his cinema, and the hypnotic authenticity that extended takes allow.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
I appreciate you taking the time for this interview, and for conducting it in English, which feels fitting on the occasion of your English-language debut.
And that happened quite naturally, too. We had Italian producers, adapting a French author’s book, with a Russian director, so it felt logical and natural to speak English as our working language. From there, the proposal was to use English as the film’s main language, which opened new doors and possibilities, such as the opportunity to work with a very good actor named Ben Whishaw.
I’m curious to ask you first about the concept of the “Russian dissident” in popular culture. How would you describe your personal relationship to that label?
First of all, I think there’s not just one explanation or one idea about the Russian dissident. All people are crucially different, and it’s quite a principled stance: each of us is individual, and we are not the same. Each person engages in dissidence on his own terms.
Limonov found himself in America in the time of Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn, when they were these Soviet-dissident stars. But both of them were opposites; they were very different. Brodsky was a rock-star poet, and Solzhenitsyn was a more political figure. His 1978 Harvard commencement address was all about the conception of how the West had to fight the Soviet Union, and how it could be made to collapse.
Limonov wanted to find his own way to be a dissident. And in America, he was a failure in this respect; he was a dissident loser when it came to finding success or experiencing a Cinderella story of any kind. Later on, in France, he became a literary star.
In the film, from his quotations, from what he’s saying, it’s quite clear that he came to resent America for its ignorance, for its lack of interest in literature and poetry. He would say, “What can I do with America? If they own Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, and these other poets, what will they have to do with a poor Russian guy who wants to destroy the whole world, who doesn’t obey?”
Resentment was one of his main themes at the time. The period he spent in New York was perhaps the worst for that city; it was terribly dirty, dark, and rat-infested, with mountains of garbage because nobody cleaned the streets. It was New York at its worst, and that’s why he didn’t find the attention he sought there as well.
He was a rock star as well, but he didn’t feel the love of the audience. He needed this extremely, to find acceptance, to feel love, to be the focus of attention. And when he lacked that, he would say, “No, it’s not about me. It’s about you. You’re all bastards. You don’t pay attention to the great thinkers, poets, and dissidents, so it’s your fault — fuck you.”
This insistence on the right to remain a poet and an individual, rather than someone allied to a specific political cause, is itself very Western, given that Russian literature at that time had developed a complex closer to that idea of civic responsibility once expressed in a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov: “You don’t have to be a poet, but a citizen you must surely be.”
For me, with this film, it is very important that he’s more than just one character. I would love to mention that it’s not a biopic about the real character Eduard Limonov; it’s based on Emmanuel Carrère’s book, which is a reflection of the real character, so this film is a reflection of a reflection.
In the book, Emmanuel says he’s confused and deeply frustrated by how to make this portrait possible, because from his Westernized point of view, he cannot explain the combination of his features. How is it possible to combine in one head hate and love, to be a fascist and to be a leftist, how to be a dissident while hating everything around the idea of the dissident?
There are a lot of contradictions, and there’s a lot of craziness and madness in this character; as a writer, Emmanuel had a very good trick up his sleeve. He said, “I have no idea how to explain him, but I will try to spin this object and look at it from various angles, and those various gazes upon him will give us the right idea of him.” It was like he was modeling the character in four dimensions.
It was challenging for me to do this as well in a film, without this becoming too much like a portrait of Limonov; that’s the work of my Russian colleagues. Let them do that. For the Western audience, it was better to look for ways to explain things that cannot be explained, to find how to create a portrait of that craziness and contradiction, to explain this wild transition from avant-garde poet to Russian fascist. How’s that possible?
Of course, I couldn’t possibly fill in all the gaps that exist in understanding his path. But we tried to do this not only through narration but also emotionally, with music and images, with the elastic physics of a flexible, dancing camera. Cinema has its own tools; as you know better than me, literature is literature, with black letters on white paper, and cinema is the art of flashing lights, of shadows on the wall.
The film is titled “Limonov: The Ballad,” and the ballad is a poetic form. For me, it was quite important to show that he is a poet, and a very good one; his poetry is sometimes even better than his literature. I was, in my youth, quite under the charm of his literature and poetry,
You focus particularly on this period in Limonov’s life prior to his decline into fascism, and you devote much of the film to exploring his emotional relationships, including with Anna and Elena, and his time in Kharkhiv (then Kharkov) and New York. How did you determine the right frame to contain this Limonov within?
Limonov had a few wives, including Nataliya Medvedeva. She was a muse of his French period, and she’s something incredible; she deserves to be the star of another movie. If you hear her songs, they are so strong; she had such a low voice. It’s very powerful. She was a great actress and a great performer. She’s even bigger than she feels that he was. And it was another strong love story. But we had no time in the film to expose all the sides of him, to explore all the curves of his rich life. Because his life contains hundreds of lives, probably.
I decided to focus on New York, on the love story with the woman who was his main love, Yelena Shchapova, or simply Elena in our film. The pair of them were like Orpheus and Eurydice in the kingdom of the dead, and there’s something like that in our film, about the poet who is losing his love. And, because of his pain, and because that pain is really disturbing and almost destroying him, he seizes the possibility to start a new life.
And this change, this resurrection, is quite an important feature of Eddie. He dies and, after a second, he goes into a new life, with a new face, new features, and new ideas within him. It’s quite a characteristic he has, and that’s one of the main explanations for his persistent ability to survive. His knack for survival is his power.
When we worked with Ben Whishaw, he asked me to find a very simple or short metaphor to explain Eddie, and I told him it’s probably easiest to refer to him as some kind of Russian Joker. This helped him understand something about Eddie which I’d been unable to explain for a long time in our conversations.
Your films evoke poetic form as well, collapsing time and space into these sequences of expressive surrealism that reflect your background in dance and theater. Tell me about what motivates those flourishes in your filmmaking.
Of course, I am a person who makes a lot of theatre and, at the same time, is quite keen to find a language in cinema that is even richer in some respects than theatre is. What I am saying is controversial because, in the theatre, you can easily open other dimensions for your anticipation and imagination.
In cinema, everything you are showing, or everything you are shooting at least, has to be quite real. You take these models from real life, create these courageous illusions, and make people strongly believe they’re true. You create the illusion of light. You lie, every second. In the theatre, there is less lying. Sometimes people say quite the opposite, but I strongly believe that the contemporary way of theatre lies much less than cinema.
I try to combine everything together, after the German composer Richard Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total art,” when you’re putting everything into one place or melting it together. That is what I admire in art, and it gives you the possibility to open new doors in film.
In Russia, in Ukraine, in New York, these worlds he’s inhabiting, there’s such an ideological schism between Soviet identity and Western identity; inside this character exist all these dueling mythologies. To what degree do you see each evolution of Limonov as a product of his environment?
That’s exactly right. It is about mythology. And mythology was especially important to Limonov. He understood the importance of shaping what legacy he would leave after his passing. Is that a fairy tale? Is that mythology? He was the kind of person who created mythology about himself every chance he got. I tried to find how to create that feeling in film; what we’re discussing here is an intellectual tendency or way of working with reality.
With film, you have to be more playful and engage in this trickster behavior of a kind to create such a paradox. That’s why I use music, dance, and several long takes; we created these surrealistic episodes with a camera appearing to fly in one take through all these people in a way that’s not realistic, perhaps not real at all, but rather part of his imagination. I wanted to make the audience confused as to what’s real life, what is imagination, and what they are meant to believe is truth versus what actually isn’t. It’s about playing a game with expectation and thrill.
In one of those sequences, you show Limonov and his friends literally running through the years, moving between rooms and buildings as time around them is compressed.
Yes, running through the years! And they are running around on a film set, which we show openly, rather than pretending it’s real. New York at that time becomes just a set for his future life. The person who practiced this long take first in cinema, probably, was Alfred Hitchcock. I was always fascinated and hypnotized by those long takes without cuts, because for me it almost looked like the truth.
When you have a cut, it is not the truth. When you have a cut, you are invoking the Kuleshov effect, that Russian trick of juxtaposition; I will shoot you, and then I will shoot the book on the table, and the audience will believe you read the book even though you didn’t. It happens all the time in what we call “fake news,” where you can create any reality you want with the help of the cut. When I say “cut,” I mean “lie.” That’s what I want to show the people watching, is that the scene is happening without the help of any cuts; it’s happening in real time, in one environment.
That question of truth also feels intrinsic to your work in film and theater, in how the artifice of performance allows you to explore controversial subject matter without self-censorship.
What is the truth? What does truth mean today? It’s a very controversial question. We are now living in a time when the truth is under attack, under threat, under reconsideration. Are we in a building right now? We’re in our idea of a building. Are we in Cannes? Probably not; we’re probably comatose. [laughs] There are a lot of philosophical and psychological questions we can ask here, and asking them will make us crazy and even more completely lost in the universe. It’s still conceptually unclear what “truth” means, and we talk a lot about this in the film.
Both Ben Whishaw and Viktoria Miroshnichenko are fantastic in this film, and their characters are so painfully intertwined. Tell me about finding them for these roles and working with both of them to build the dynamic between Eddie and Elena.
We had no traditional casting process, because I knew from the first second that I wanted Ben Whishaw. I had heard that producers were coming up with another proposal for me, filled with bigger-name actors who wanted to participate, which might have meant bigger box-office potential for the film, but for me, it was always Ben Whishaw and nobody else.
Firstly, I had wanted to work with him; secondly, when I placed his face alongside Limonov’s face, it felt like a mirror portrait. When we met in person, I understood that he was the type of actor who would dig into this material, into this creature, into the beast—who’d slip Limonov under his skin and be an embodiment of him. His performance was the only way out for that beast. Ben practiced the Method acting, the Stanislavski system, where you don’t play or pretend, but instead become.
This was the only way for me to work with Vika, as well. We’d had talks with various actresses from the American and British film industries, but I decided to cast Vika because she had one important feature the other great actresses lacked: vulnerability. She was very fragile and insecure. The other actresses were very strong, guarded, well-prepared, with these layers of armor. Vika was lost in the process, and she had no idea how to play this; and it was in her absence of surety and strength that we found something crucially important for this character.
Paweł Pawlikowski adapted Carrère’s novel into a screenplay and had planned to direct, but he lost interest in the project, saying he didn’t like Limonov enough as a person to make a film about him. Did your personal perceptions of Limonov play a role in your decision to direct?
We don’t know each other, Paweł Pawlikowski. He started the film, and then stepped away; a producer needed to ask me to direct for it to continue. By the way, do you know the famous footage of Limonov shooting machine-gun rounds down at civilians in Sarajevo, during the Balkan War, with Radovan Karadzic? That was Paweł’s footage, from his “Serbian Epics” documentary. [A/N: Limonov disputed this depiction before his death, stating in a 2009 video conference that he’d been firing at a shooting range in Pale, tens of kilometers from Sarajevo.]
I found Limonov challenging, but I do enjoy opening doors that would otherwise stay closed. The territory was quite difficult, with that character, but my next character portrait will be even worse, as it is of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. This next film’s almost finished; it’s called “Disappearance,” based on the novel by Olivier Guez, and it’s about Dr. Mengele, a Nazi war criminal who tried to hide in the jungles of South America. Mengele’s son comes to visit him and asks hard questions about Auschwitz; it’s more or less a film about a conversation between father and son.
It’s quite a subject, and quite a character—as with Limonov. And for a Western intellectual, of course, that subject is quite dirty and blood-stained; what to do with him is not clear. But I had something I felt I could express by making a film about him.
“Limonov: The Ballad” is streaming on the Criterion Channel this month, as part of “Starring Ben Whishaw,” while “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele” is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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