Siberian Education (2013)

Siberian Education arrives with the grim composure of a folk tale told in a cold room. Gabriele Salvatores follows Kolyma and Gagarin, two boys raised in a Transnistrian settlement of exiled criminals, taught by John Malkovich's grandfather to despise Soviet officials, bankers, and soldiers. The boys rob, one is imprisoned, and seven years later the brotherhood's code has dissolved into the drug trade. It is a coming-of-age story with a body count and a very strict rulebook. The film was shot in Lithuania standing in for Russia, performed in English by a Lithuanian, Italian, and American cast, and based on a memoir whose factual basis has been questioned. None of this constitutes a representation program. It is simply how European co-productions get made.

The film's hostility toward bankers and state officials is worth separating from any modern economic complaint. Kuzya's creed is a criminal's creed, a rejection of the Soviet apparatus and everyone in it, and it curdles into nothing more than turf warfare. There is no systemic critique here, no appeal to the audience's conscience, no instruction on how to vote or what to buy. Women appear, notably Eleanor Tomlinson's Xenya, but the camera is interested in men and their knives. The body count is not framed as a lesson. The environment is snow, and snow is not a cause.

The craft is intact. The photography is handsome, Malkovich is reliably watchable, and the whole thing carries the melancholy of a story that knows it is a story. The dialogue, delivered in heavy accents, strains credulity, and the film never quite earns its own gravity. But it does not lecture. It does not correct the past to flatter the present. It does not ask to be praised for its sensitivity. It asks only that we watch two friends become enemies in the snow, and it lets us draw our own conclusions. In the current climate, that restraint reads as almost archaic. A film with nothing to teach and no one to scold. The sommelier would call it a dry vintage, unremarkable, honest about its own bitterness.