Nika, the Crimean prodigy who couldn’t juggle

Nika

Dir. Vasilisa Kuzmina

Russia

Premiered in SXSW Film Festival 2022

Early on in Nika, we see the title character Nika Turbina walk in a narrow alley towards the sea after buying a pack of cigarettes from a seaside vendor. She walks so longingly towards the scenic Black Sea coast in her Crimean town of Yalta that we somehow fear she might never stop and go on to drown herself a la Virginia Wolf. As it happens, she doesn’t (not just yet) but her manic actions throughout the film show we were right to worry.

Film history is filled with manic genius characters who cut a compelling figure on screen. But what makes this one stand out is how her restless mania is always coupled with a deeply humane sense. Actress Elizaveta Yankovskaya brings to screen Nika’s outrage at life that somehow never feels gratuitous or excessive.

The film is loyal to all basic historical facts about Nika Turbina, a phenomenal Russian poet and child prodigy. Having written poetry as young as 4, she published her first book in 1984 at the age of ten. Selling out tens of thousands of copies and recordings of her recitations across the Soviet Union, the Yalta-born poet became an international phenomenon and won a Golden Lion at Venice Biennale at the age of 11. But the film takes place years later: as Nika, now in her late 20s, battles an exploitative relationship with her mother who repeatedly sets her on dates with rich men; a boyfriend who turns out to have unpalatable secrets in places as far away as Japan; and a society who remembers her as something of a curiosity. Her attempt to make something of her life by enrolling in a prestigious drama school in Moscow is not without its challenges, despite her early success at the auditions.

The compelling consistency in the film’s portrayal of Nika owes as much to Yankovskaya’s award-winning performance as to the lively script by Yulia Gulyan (co-written with Kuzmina.) Having previously worked on two Russian family comedies and a mini-series that also premiered at South by Southwest, Gulyan now proves herself in the difficult genre of historical biopic. The film’s decision to focus on Turbina’s last months, before her tragic death at the age of 27 in 2002, allows the character to come out fully in granular detail.

After featuring historical footage of Nika’s recitation as a child, the film begins with the now-adult Nika in a party alongside her peers. Neither drinking nor joining in on the conversations around her, Nika seems to be alone in the party; except for the fact that everyone knows of this this famous former child prodigy of the late Soviet era — a bygone era that feels as distant as Nika in the party. A young man’s request for her to read her poetry is met by a response we will hear throughout the film: ‘I don’t recite.’

As Nika goes through her life, she remains as lost as she was in the party; as unsure about her past as a child poet, as uncomfortable in her surroundings. She’s been told she needs to learn to juggle to get into Moscow’s drama schools; a rumor that might not even be true but that doesn’t stop her from trying. Yet Nika is heart-crushingly bad at juggling and can never quite get the hang of it; a symbolically powerful of her struggles to fit in.

When Nika does find out what she wants in life and what makes her tick, she’s faced with what so many of us experience at one point or another: things don’t turn out the way you want; people are not who you think they are. It’s all too much.

Carrying much of the film on her back is Anna Mikhalkova as Nika’s mother. We first see her when she suggestively queries Nika as she heads to the fridge for some eggs. Was there no food at the party she returned from? The complexity of their relationship doesn’t mask its exploitative nature. From when she was a child poet, it is the mother who has stage-managed Nika; the mother who wants to pimp her out to rich suitors now; and the mother who undermines her in every stage, not least in her quest for the drama school. Yet she remains a sympathetic character; if one with strongly dark undertones. The mother-child relationship comes to a powerful denouement in the final stage of the film, in a powerful scene that raises new questions about Nika’s place in history.

The film’s historical background is not forced on the viewer in Gulyan and Kuzmina’s script; but it is  still powerfully present. The film takes places in early 2000s, a decade or so after the fall of the Soviet Union and one of the most misery-filled periods in Russian history where millions of lives were upset with a historic fall in standards of living and a quick dissipation of values as authoritarian socialism was replaced by mafioso oligarchic capitalism. We never find out where exactly do the fortunes of Viktor (Evgeniy Sangadzhiev), an ex-convict and a wealthy suitor of Nika who’s been obsessed with her all his life, come from but it’s not hard to imagine either. There is something powerful at work here: Nika’s past as a child prodigy seems as absurd to her present as are the Soviet ideals to those portrayed in the film. Like the Soviet Union, the amazing 11-year-old Nika is gone forever.

In its historical setting and bold portrayals of interpersonal relations, Nika reminds us of some of the best of Russian cinema in recent years: Andrey Zyvagintsev’s Loveless, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Leto or even Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s controversial Dau project. But it also remains refreshingly original and promising for Kuzmina as director, Gulyan as writer and Yankovskaya as actress.