Big cities are full of stories. Individuals and groups each have their own purposes and narratives that they live out alongside the millions of other narratives playing out around them. But what might all these narratives look like from the point of view of the city itself? This is, I think, part of what Ekaterina Selenkina is trying to achieve with her perplexing and intriguing film, Detours, which is part of the 78th annual Venice Film Festival.
In nearly every shot of Moscow, where all of the film takes place, the architecture dominates. It is unremittingly bleak and gray. But the cinematography is such that the buildings seem like trees in a huge forest, with all the individuals moving incomprehensibly among them. The individuals are stripped of their narratives and all we see are glimpses of their lives which, from the point of view of the buildings, make very little sense. A group of girls taking selfies. A group of men playing volleyball. These are things that just happen, from the point of view of the buildings, and then they stop happening. Most of the images we see here are exterior. And this film could really be broken up into a series of still photographs and would likely constitute an award-winning photo exhibition.
As should go without saying at this point, the film lacks any kind of narrative structure and even any real protagonist. It is in this sense, experimental, and focused more on the interplay between human beings and architecture. Still, there is something of a story unfolding here.
Against the backdrop of the silent and brutal architecture, we follow a young man named Dennis as he examines every nook and cranny of the buildings for places to hide drugs. He’s one of what are known as treasuremen. These are people who hide drugs in various places for others to find. This is, it turns out, a new way of dealing drugs that is meant to be very difficult for the authorities to trace or prevent. Dennis interacts with the buildings directly, both on foot, and through his computer, where he takes images and marks where the drugs are hidden. He has run ins with the law; police who search his belongings and force him to strip naked for no reason that the audience can grasp. He’s also pursued by a random man on the street, again, for no reason that we can see. There’s a party that’s broken up by the police. Why? We don’t know. Again, these things just happen and then they stop happening, from the lofty and impersonal point of view of the structures.
But we can’t help but feel that on top of this experimental and quite fascinating approach, there is a real concern for justice in human terms. Selenkina has something to say here about dealing drugs and the harshness of police tactics. I don’t believe we’re supposed to feel any real sympathy for Dennis, who, after all is engaged in distributing illegal drugs on behalf of shadowy people we only meet through text messages on Dennis’ phone. According to the director’s statement that accompanied the screener for the film, one goal of Detour was to demonstrate this new method of dealing drugs, but also to shine a light on the brutality of the Russian police. She says she and her crew were frequently stopped, asked for their papers and frisked. She also notes that Russia has fairly serious penalties for dealing drugs: several years of prison for 6 grams of marijuana, for example.
But I found myself wondering if this concern with the police and their harshness was not at odds with the broader, more artistic aims of the film. If we are, in a sense, watching the goings on of human beings in Moscow from the points of view of the buildings themselves, then we must wonder if the architecture cares at all about matters of right and wrong. But then, without this small thread of narrative, this would have been a very hard film to watch. As it is, it is not exactly Hollywood blockbuster material. But the tension between the more abstract concerns of making a film with no real narrative and the desire to show something of the injustice of Russia and its drug laws, shows us just how hard a task Selenkina set for herself, and how profoundly addicted human beings are to stories and a sense of justice.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.