The year is 2017. One hundred years have passed since the Russian Revolution. The landscape of Alexey German Jnr’s latest film UNDER ELECTRIC CLOUDS is both figuratively and metaphorically clouded and cold. It feels like an eternal winter has set in. The White Witch of C.S.Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe here is a political system at breaking point with a globalised world. A new world war is hinted at, waiting around the corner. The cyclical nature of mankind’s history is revealed through contrasting this near-future, with the remnants of Lenin’s cultural people’s revolution one hundred years ago.

Of course, this is a work of fiction. The recent controversy surrounding the release of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s quiet masterpiece LEVIATHAN illuminated the challenges facing Russian filmmakers in securing funding from their State, if their work is even ever-so-slightly critical of its financial backers. UNDER ELECTRIC CLOUDS’ production is, therefore, all the more intriguing by the fact it is co-produced by Metrafilms, a Russian production company, and Linked Films, a Ukrainian production company. Cinema as a unifying force for good between two countries.

The fictional nature of this film at times makes it feel darkly humorous, in a manner akin to upcoming Argentinian black comedy WILD TALES, from director Damián Szifrón. Yet viewed as a companion piece to another film premiering here at Berlinale, Tatiana Brandrup’s documentary CINEMA: A PUBLIC AFFAIR (which details the recent challenges faced by Naum Kleiman, the Russian film historian and now former director of the Moscow Film Museum) one realises that the fictional future of Russia in 2017 is not so far removed from the reality of 2015. Sure, there are house robots (think ROBOT AND FRANK – but clunkier) and adverts projected into the clouds, but these are technological advances that feel like they are almost ready to be rolled out now, in an era of 3D handheld computer consoles and fingerprint I.D. mobile phones. The massive construction sites – spurred on by a rampant, unrestrained, unregulated, and arguably corrupt capitalist system, feel more realistic a depiction of contemporary Russia, and are quite possibly the antagonists within the film.

Seemingly no-one other than Sasha is interested in the identity of this slumbering icon in the sand…

Split episodically into seven segments, UNDER ELECTRIC CLOUDS has a multi-voiced narrative structure whose variance keeps the evolving scenes feeling fresh within the 130 minute run-time. Cycling through the hierarchies of the class system, German Jnr. focuses firstly on Karim (Karim Pakachakov), an immigrant Kyrgyz worker searching for his friend. If you’re wondering where Kyrgystan is, it’s just north of the westernmost tip of China, and south of Kazakhstan. Importantly, it’s just close enough to Russian building sites to justify what must be a horrendously long initial journey to work. We then move to Sasha (Viktoriya Korotkova), the weary heiress to this land, which may or may not have been corruptly acquired by her deceased father, when Gorbachev’s Perestroika was in full swing. Nikolay (Merab Ninidze) is a tour guide at a stately home on Sasha’s estate, equipped with a PHD and enough oversight of the situation at play to be angry to the point of taking affirmative action. Petr (Louis Franck) is the architect responsible for designing the unfinished tower block, commissioned by Sasha’s father as an architectural wonder, but whose legacy is similar to the washed up whale in LEVIATHAN: a ghostly skeleton on the landscape.

This is a heavily symbolic film. A statue of Lenin, his right arm outstretched towards the nothingness of the surround landscape, sits in a quiet state of disrepair. Unlike Anthony Gormley’s 1997 exhibition ‘Another Place’, whose cast-iron bodyforms invited the general public to come forth and contemplate their meaning, seemingly no-one other than Sasha is interested in the identity of this slumbering icon in the sand; what he stands for; what Russian era he is from. This is the most true in the young character of Valya (Chulpan Khamatova), who is currently reading a philosophy book which states that Stalin and Hitler weren’t such bad chaps after all. History slowly repeats and revises itself, depending on who can pay to publish the intellectual thoughts and newsprint of the day. An important, dreamy, body of work from a director uneasy with the direction of his country, which appears in 2015 to be regressing towards the totalitarian, oppressive near-future depicted in this accomplished work of fiction.

UNDER ELECTRIC CLOUDS premiered in the Wettbewerb section at Berlinale 2015.
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