Newspaper Horror

Russia's film industry may be sprinting ahead at a rate pretty much unparalleled elsewhere in the world today -- but, sooner or later, it was bound to stumble.

Denis Neimand's "Junk" (Zhest) looks like just such a trip, though you can't fault the film's producers for lack of courage in choosing its English-language title. Nor for including such memorable lines as "Start using your brains, if you have any!" or having the heroine periodically exclaim, "Oh, God! What a load of rubbish!" The latter sentiment may well resound with a large proportion of whatever audience Neymand's film attracts.

It's something of a trip in a different sense, too, with a hallucinogenic style that usually works best with student viewers at midnight screenings. Russian critics certainly haven't embraced it, though, judging by the standoffish atmosphere at a Moscow press screening, which approached almost Cold War levels of frigidity.

If Russian cinema has only recently been relearning lessons of genre, then "Junk" runs willfully (some would add woefully) away from any such direction. The film's solution is to invent its own genre, the psikhovik. Aside from purportedly being a term for a kind of magic mushroom, the word gets the following quasi-academic definition in the film's press materials: "Film genre variously combining elements of psychological (often, psycho-pathological) thriller, action, psychedelic drama and classic comedy. Distinguished by a riot of absolutely unchecked fantasies ... and general pathological (in the best sense) interpretation of surrounding reality." Well, at least there's no faulting the filmmakers on effort.

The opening scene has heroine Marina (Alyona Babenko), a star journalist with the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda who's disillusioned with her job, called in to mediate a standoff between police and the previous subject of one of her reports (Gosha Kutsenko, this time fully nude) who has lost his marbles. She thinks she's been brought in as a genuine intermediary, but in fact, it's only to draw him into the line of sniper fire. Result: Marina leaves splattered with blood, and even more disillusioned than when she started.

Which sends her into alcohol-fueled withdrawal at her comfortable Moscow apartment, prompting a general question: Why have recent screen depictions of Russian journalists (think Filipp Yankovsky's "Moving") given them the kind of lifestyle that wouldn't look out of place with supermodels? The answer in this case might come from that old devil, product placement. To secure her investigative journo credentials, the heroine obviously has to work somewhere, but newspaper rivalry kicks in here with clear references to KP's competitor Kommersant. The opening titles rather cleverly mirror the page style of that publication, but a visual reference to it in the closing scenes looks so absurd as to seem almost drug-induced.

She is persuaded to re-enter the fray, for the last time, to write about a maniac teacher (a plumper than usual Mikhail Yefremov) who has raped and killed his pupils -- or so it would seem, because a later plot twist hints that he might, perhaps, not be the real killer. The producers of "Junk" were critical of journalists revealing story denouement, so from here on, this review will try to respect their concerns.

Said maniac is incarcerated in an asylum, where he is watched over by a head doctor who is himself less than sane (Sergei Shakurov in a scene-stealing cameo). The maniac escapes, and Marina goes off in hot pursuit. By the way, here's a hint on the continuity front: If Marina ends up in an obviously southern landscape, maybe it would be good to signpost the change of locale more clearly, so viewers don't wonder why there suddenly seem to be mountains in the Moscow region?

Marina meets the lead investigator (the sexy Vyacheslav Razbegayev), who drives an enviable Jeep but gets brutally killed after 10 minutes, ending any potential romantic involvement. Then, in rapid fire, she is abandoned in a creepy dacha settlement overrun by characters out of "Mad Max," sees deaths, has a psychedelic trip, sees more deaths, encounters the maniac, escapes and chases him to the closing showdown.

"Junk" is fast-moving throughout, with two car chases so superfluously filmed as to be blatantly show-off-ish. Babenko, who literally limped through her last screen role in Pavel Chukhrai's "Driver for Vera," streaks ahead here with a velocity that seems to allow her to escape any kind of pursuing vehicle.

But enough such carping. The technical work in "Junk" is occasionally striking, and the whole thing might just work well at 2 a.m. Whether it works well enough to earn back its announced $4 million budget, however, could be another matter. If not, then it will be the film's producers -- rather than its viewers -- who end up with the hangover.

"Junk" (Zhest) is playing in Russian at movie theaters citywide.