In early October, the world's press was full of excitement about Hollywood's latest blockbuster, The Kingdom, in which US government agents, led by star du jour Jamie Foxx, investigate a terrorist bomb in a western housing complex in Saudi Arabia. Yawn. Not only is the plot shop-soiled, but the idea that we can see the state of America reflected in Hollywood's latest bauble is too. Yes, the US is anxious about the middle east and yes its mainstream entertainments express this anxiety, but The Kingdom does this so obviously that there's nothing new to say.
The real story about mainstream cinema lies in another big, flashy entertainment film that opened on 5th October. Its credits begin with the familiar logo of Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox studio. But the film's name is Dnevnoy dozor—Day Watch in English. Box office-wise, it is the biggest movie made in Russia since the fall of the Soviet empire.
But its bigness isn't the story. Day Watch got disdainful reviews from Britain's posh critics—the Sunday Times called it "unbearably noisy and deadening." Yet Danny Boyle said that the film to which it is a sequel, Night Watch, would have Tarkovsky spinning in his grave—this was a compliment—and Quentin Tarantino called it "an epic of extraordinary power." And I am considering ending the updated version of my book The Story of Film with it. Night Watch and Day Watch made me excited, for the first time in ages, about the aesthetics of entertainment cinema. What's going on?
Flash forward to August 2007. I'd heard that Night Watch (2004), based on a novel by Sergei Lukyanenko, was a sci-fi/vampire Matrix mishmash, so I had given it a body swerve at the time. But I deign to see a press screening of Day Watch (pictured, right). I sit in the front row, the curtains open and there unspools before me a testosterone-fuelled, CGI-engorged, market-sassy film—wearyingly familiar blockbuster elements—that nevertheless makes the Lord of the Rings trilogy look creatively puny, which it is.
The surfaces of Day Watch and Night Watch (which I've now seen too) are the first things you notice. The films' subtitles physically respond to the action, as if they are in the room with it rather than added on afterwards, splishing on walls, slashed by knives, vibrating when doors are banged. The Manichean world of the story, though unfathomable and probably absurd, has a torque around which everything seems to spin. Contemporary Moscow represents light (but is still like a film noir) and is contrasted to a dark parallel world that looks like Fritz Lang's Metropolis mixed with porridge and whizzed in a food processor. Shot and scene transitions are mostly whipping morphs of some form—though they happen so fast (and I was having so much fun) that I couldn't always clock them. About 40 minutes into Day Watch, a male and female pair of characters swap bodies, and the effect is less Freaky Friday than as if Bogie and Bacall had done so—sexy and insolent. The clothes are Helmut Newton meets Jessica Rabbit meets Sergio Leone meets the Wachowski brothers.
How have these movies come to look so new? Their fortysomething Kazakh writer-director Timur Bekmambetov started off in commercials and music videos. He debuted as a feature filmmaker in 1994, then, in 2000, directed the ultra-trash sword and thong gladiatorial flick The Arena. The Arena was hardly an artistic stretch for Bekmambetov, and the acting was appalling, but he had a chance to experiment with digital effects and so prepared his CGI palette for Night Watch.
Film imagery in the digital age can feel empty and affectless, but what gives the Watch movies weight is that, like the great city films before them, their production designer's stylebook is highly responsive to a remarkable piece of urbanism—in this case, Moscow. In 2005, Bekmambetov told Time Out that "half of me is the filmmaker—vampires, Roger Corman, Matrix, American movies—and half of my mentality is Russian reality—very poor people, lots of problems, very rich oil barons, Roman Abramovich." He explained, "Stylistically I feel the image of Moscow is of a very grey, very depressing city… we decided to change the image of Moscow"; "The 1990s was a very strange time in Russia… Sergei Lukyanenko wrote this novel in 1998 and the country was broken into two parts, the people older than 20 and the people younger than 20, and there was a big battle between these two generations."
This explains much, I think: the Manichaeism of the Watch films, their porridgy look that keeps bursting into fields of colour, their energy, their sense of being haunted, their noir melancholia, their escapism. They are daft, and even boring at times, but they are stylistic revelations. Bekmambetov's comments suggest the films's visual distinction is a Dionysian response to Russia's amazing social change.
He has pulled the centre of gravity of mainstream filmmaking eastwards. I would like to think that it might stay there for a while, but he has signed a deal with Hollywood and is directing an action thriller, starring Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman. The company? Universal, which made The Kingdom.
