“Transfixing, mesmerizing, infuriating, and frightening, sometimes all at the same time”

Megalomaniacal. Problematic. Insane. The Stalinist Truman Show. A lot has been said about DAU, the biopic that turned into something slightly bigger in the hands of Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky. Slightly. A 24/7 functioning, 12,000 m2 set where everybody involved in front of the camera played their role continuously, regardless of whether a camera was around. What ostensibly began as a portrait loosely based on Russian theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau, nickname Dau, turned into one of the biggest, and certainly the most controversial film projects ever conceived. Scandals and accusations plagued the project from the moment the first two films in the now multi-film project were screened at the Berlin film festival. Dau. Natasha, playing in Competition, featured a scene in which the titular character was forced to insert a cognac bottle into her vagina by a KGB officer, played by an actual former KGB officer with experience with such torture (by all accounts the act was simulated, though that knowledge doesn’t make it an easier watch). In DAU. Degeneration five goons are recruited by that same KGB officer, now director of the secret institute that is at the heart of the DAU project, to kill everyone and destroy the institute. Khrzhanovsky hired some actual neo-Nazis, including real-life Russian fascist Maksim Martsinkevich, to do the job. While they didn’t actually kill the actors (that would be something), they allegedly attacked a queer artist on set repeatedly. Oh, and the film features animal cruelty. In short, the project wasn’t without controversy, and raised discussion about how far one can go in the name of art.

For years the project more or less fell into oblivion. Every time a discussion about art and on-set abuse flared up, the films might come up, and Khrzhanovsky released more features on a platform that now looks defunct and fully dedicated to the biopic that he initially envisioned. There was a multimedia art installation that travelled several European cities with at best moderate success. The quality of the online releases varied heavily; some were excellent, some were abysmal. The idea that anything related to DAU would ever be seen on the big screen again faded away.

Until now. Simply titled DAU, a three-and-a-half hour (if you include the 15 minutes of intermission) film that is indeed the chronologically (and only that) straightforward ‘biopic’ (quotes fully intended) of Landau that started it all saw the light on the Mostra. Sprawling, meandering, and in every fiber of its being a DAU film, Khrzhanovsky’s ‘mother film’ of the project is the kind of feature that is simply not made anymore. Not because productions don’t go through hundreds of thousands of potential extras (they don’t), or because actors, artists, and scientists don’t let themselves get locked in a Soviet-era set complete with all Soviet-era inconveniences, including unpleasant interrogations (they don’t), but because few filmmakers have this kind of ambition and ‘mad man’ grand vision anymore, with everyone from studio heads pinching budgets to intimacy coordinators making sure you don’t pinch the wrong body parts now responsible for reigning in this ultimate auteur energy. That is not meant as condonement of the excesses that may or may not have happened on set, but simply an explanation why Khrzhanvosky, not strapped for cash since Russian oligarch money started pouring into the project, might have developed somewhat of a god complex that led to this unrestrained work of art.

But is it any good? First of all, those who have seen the online projects or DAU. Degeneration will recognize quite a few scenes, either in whole or to some degree edited. This isn’t to say that DAU is cobbled together, but it does show that this film stays firmly on the surface of the character of Dau (and his wife Nora), while some of the less seen features deepen them (to varying success, it must be said). The film spans 40 years, from Dau’s beginnings as a brilliant young quantum physicist in 1928 Leningrad to his final days in Moscow in 1968. One simply cannot fit four decades in 195 minutes and expect a comprehensive character study of a complex man such as Lev Landau. What Khrzhanovsky manages to get across, together with non-professional Greek-Russian actor Teodor Currentzis, is beguiling, frustrating, and ultimately fascinating. Starting out in 1928, as Dau teaches theoretical physics to uninterested students, his conviction of his own genius is evident early on and never wavers. Sporting a hairdo that reminds of The Cure’s Robert Smith and wearing a deep red jacket that makes him stand out against the drabness of 1920s Leningrad (is this a possible nod to Schindler’s List? Later a red balloon pierces the grey as well), he meets his future wife Nora (Radmila Shchogolieva), the two starting a rocky affair that would last for almost half a century. Throughout the film, their complicated love for each other remains, no matter how much Dau philanders under her nose in the later stages of their relationship, experimenting not only in laboratories but also in his own marriage as an adherent to free love. At some point during this later period, Nora asks a visiting Greek actress (Maria Nafpliotou) who she caught Dau with whether they look like a couple or not. When the woman affirms this, both Nora and Dau seem content with the answer – their marriage may be unconventional, but they still are each other’s closest human connection in a place where such a thing is rare. When Dau almost loses her early on after a humiliating putdown, he is quick to seek her out and tell her how sorry he is; it is perhaps his most selfless and human moment in a film that mostly portrays him as a man whose ego forces him to look down upon others, and whose great intellect prevents him from having respect on a cerebral level for anybody but his mentor Krupitsa (Anatoly Vassiliev) and a few of his fellow scientists.

One entity he does have to respect though is the state. A defiant Dau refuses, like many colleagues in his field, to apply his science to any war effort when the Soviet Union asks them to work on an atomic bomb. Imprisonment, and for some of his friends and colleagues death, follows, which their steadfast spirit being slowly broken by the brutal Soviet apparatus. In one extremely violent interrogation Dau is hit with a hose repeatedly, and at one point his torturer completely humiliates the naked Dau by urinating into his mouth (we’ll assume this was simulated, but with this project you never know; some sexual activities throughout the film certainly don’t seem to be). After this, Dau starts to cooperate and is put in charge of a secret scientific institute in Moscow, though one has to question just how secret it is when several foreign scientists visit the site for lectures and discussions (in DAU. Natasha, one of them even had drunken sex with the titular character, a woman working in the institute’s canteen). This sort of crowd naturally attracts the attention of the KGB, although the debauchery displayed by the upper echelons of the institute had already turned their eye towards Dau’s clique. Led by the terrifying, stone-faced Vladimir (Vladimir Azhippo, of Natasha’s cognac bottle), agents begin to put pressure on the institute’s staff to report on anything Dau and his fellow scientist do, either by direct or indirect threats. Slowly but surely the toxic influence of the Soviet state strangles the institute to death, until its destruction in the film’s epilogue, for which Khrzhanovsky filmed the demolition of DAU‘s massive set at the hands of the aforementioned neo-Nazis. As an ailing and bedridden Dau crumbles, so does everything he built. Such is the way of a totalitarian state.

Ostensibly a biopic, DAU takes many liberties with the life and career of Lev Landau, although some aspects like the man’s obsession with sex are certainly true. For one, the real Dau wasn’t Greek, but Khrzhanovsky creating a link to the classical world ties in well with the Greek tragedy of DAU, in which morals and ethics seem alien and outdated to our own. The film as a whole feels of a different era, as something that wasn’t made today (granted, principal photography ended 15 years ago), and is more akin to the less plot-driven and more philosophical cinema of the 60s and 70s, though its references of Russian cinema span a much longer period. The massive set pieces in Leningrad, with hundreds of extras, evoke Eisenstein, though at some point the more tactile, dirty world of Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God comes to mind, not in the least because of a soundscape filled with squelching mud and trickling water. Tarkovsky feels omnipresent in outdoor scenes pregnant with paranoia, as well as in the bowels of the institute, and Sokurov’s slanted cinematography in Mother and Son is almost directly referenced in a visually disorienting scene at the foot of a giant Soviet statue. One can even find some Fellini in here, in particular 8 1/2 Weeks. DAU feels like cinema from a bygone era, an expression of existentialism through art in which narrative is secondary, even if it is supposedly a biopic. Human nature and its ethics are what drives both Dau and DAU, and it can be felt in every image. Some scenes are fairly uninteresting scientific ruminations. Characters move at a slow pace and in an unending state of ponderance. Conversations are often entirely theoretical in nature. The only recent project that comes to mind is Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a similarly megalomaniacal film that aims for elevated grand cinema. Coppola’s effort is a complete misfire, but Khrzhanovsky’s film somehow succeeds, against the odds of toppling under its own weight. Films like this just aren’t made anymore.

Given its production history, some might say that is a good thing. The cliche of the tyrannical director, abuse on set both off and in front of the camera (one can’t help but think of Romy Schneider in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris here), and an unsafe workplace where the alcohol flowed freely to temper inhibitions. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It all harkens back to an era in which great art was created, but one can question at what expense. DAU follows in that tradition half a century later. ‘Questionable’ is a mild description for Khrzhanovsky’s methods, and DAU is the kind of project that has attained legendary status just based on the stories alone; Terry Gilliam’s Man From La Mancha is dwarfed by it in this regard. And still there are moments that are inexplicably dull, or just inexplicable (why was there a shaman, for instance?). But when it works, boy does it work. It is transfixing, mesmerizing, infuriating, and frightening, sometimes all at the same time. How a biopic of a relatively unknown Russian scientist has turned into this exceptional (and exceptionally insane) piece of art is a miracle. Despite the bitter taste of how it was created, it is impossible to look away. Discussing the gorgeous cinematography (by three cinematographers, though the lion’s share done by Jürgen Jürges), the stupendous production design and period-accurate costuming (that actors were made to wear 24/7), and even the acting, in many cases done by non-professionals, seems pointless. DAU is an experience, a film that can stand on its own despite being part of something greater. Your mileage may vary with how much you can take of its meandering, slow pace, its bursts of violence and humiliation, and its fair share of intellectual posturing, but its undeniable that this is a singular film that is an exponent of a wholly unique, insane project. We may never see its like again, and we should probably be glad of that, but don’t deny yourself a glimpse at the fine line between genius and madness.