Ayka (Sergey Dvortsevoy, 2018) (Patreon)

This review contains minor spoilers. The tabula rasa types should steer clear. That means you, Mike.

As of this moment (June 2019), Sergey Dvortsevoy's Ayka is the only one of last year's Cannes Competition titles not to have found a U.S. distributor. In fact, by this point almost all of them have been released here. (Leto and At War are coming out later this year.) So what's the deal? Is Ayka just uniquely awful?

Well, not exactly. I will say, knowing how distributors tend to troll for movies at festivals, I am not at all surprised that they have passed on Ayka. From a certain point of view, it is unreleaseable in the current American climate. Within the first eight minutes, we have the protagonist abandoning her newborn baby, and then joining dozens of other women in a dank, filthy basement to scald barely-dead chickens to roughly remove their feathers. The typical NPR-listening arthouse patron hates that kind of stuff.

But taken on its own merits, Ayka is a rather, shall we say, problematic text. On a formal level, it might impress us with its breathless urgency, were it not for the existence of the entire filmography of the Dardenne brothers, of which Ayka tends to feel like an unintentional compendium. Dvortsevoy is essentially rehearsing their shtick of treating abject poverty not as a grinding weight but as a breakneck battle for minute-to-minute survival, with dangerous obstacles at every turn. Will you lose this job because the bus broke down? Will an equally desperate rival stab you in the back? Will a sudden illness plunge you into homelessness? Etc.

The major difficulty is that, where the Dardennes understand capitalism as a regrettable situation under which people struggle but often try to maintain their dignity and basic decency, Dvortsevoy is a Kazakh who subscribes to the popular "Russia is hell on earth" theory. And while this may not be false, exactly, in a film like this it leads to a kind of extreme miserablism where people kick the shit out of Ayka (Samal Yeslyamova), not just because they have to, but almost because they take sinister pleasure in bullying the weak.

So this leads to a convoluted sort of faux-realism. Ayka is in dire straits because of social circumstances, in particular poverty and the difficult plight of immigrants. But within the span of two days, she is hemorrhaging from her perforated uterus, and suffering from severe mastitis, and getting chased by deadly loan sharks, and getting her job stolen by a younger immigrant, and living under threat of a police raid at her illegal flophouse, and on and on, all the while being practically spat upon by ordinary Russians in the street. 

So the actual problems of someone in Ayka's position are getting confused with Dvortsevoy's evident desire to depict Moscow as a metropolis of the damned, and his application of hand-held "realism" only confuses matters further. (Compare this with the fiction films of Sergei Loznitsa, who makes many of the same points about the venality of Putin's Russia, but does so with an abstract, almost surreal approach that foregrounds his partiality.)

What is actually interesting about Ayka, and tends to get lost in all the breakneck hurtling through the post-Soviet nightmarescape, is the way that the maternal body continually thwarts this woman. She doesn't want to have given birth, for reasons that become apparent later in the film. Throughout her struggles to find and keep jobs, she is seen stuffing wads of toilet paper up her crotch to stem the excessive bleeding, and later, as her breasts ache, she is shown in a supply closet roughly expressing her milk into a bowl to relieve the pressure. It is unglamorous to say the least, but demonstrates how a woman's body can be subject to physical trials that those making demands of her (mostly men, of course) cannot even imagine.