DAU. Natasha (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel, 2020) (Patreon)

The first film to be released from the gargantuan DAU project (five others are now available), Natasha resembles what we typically think of an an art film, at least on its surface. That's to say, it is mostly comprehensible as a standalone work of art, and it succeeds in conveying a specific time and place and populating it with reasonably understandable characters. But of course, knowing a bit of the background on Khrzhanovskiy's perverse enterprise produces some deeper resonances throughout the film, as well as some ethical qualms. Natasha can probably serve as a good litmus test for a viewer, determining whether he or she wants to go any further down the DAU rabbit hole.

Taking place almost entirely within cramped interiors, Natasha is primarily centered on a very well-appointed Soviet canteen where high ranking officers come to take their lunch. Considering that the story is meant to take place in the 1950s, the plentiful foodstuffs are a tipoff that we are stationed in some elite sector of the government apparatus. Eventually we discover that the canteen is part of a classified science lab where secretive fringe experiments are taking place.

The canteen is run by Natasha (Natasha Berezhnaya) and her younger underling Olya (Olya Shkabarnya), two women who maintain a professional facade during business hours but, during the evening clean-ups, engage in a Beckett / Genet style game of attraction and repulsion, plying each other with witticisms and booze one moment, professing their mutual hatred the next. These extended sequences, with their clear basis in improvisation, are the most challenging portions of Natasha, and it takes awhile for the actresses to find their groove. But when they do, they provide the humanistic anchor in a film that is, at its base, about Stalinism's blithe dehumanization of nearly everyone under its eye.

After repeated visits to the canteen, a visiting French scientist, Luc (Luc Bigé), takes a shine to Natasha and, following an evening of drunken revelry, the two hook up. The lonely, romantic Natasha takes the encounter as meaning more than it did for Luc, but this is only the beginning of her trouble, since her impulsive decision to have a liaison with a foreign national is considered treasonous by the KGB. Natasha is spirited away in the night and interrogated by one General Azhippo (Vladimir Azhippo), who subjects her to various physical and emotional humiliations.

Some have complained, understandably so, that DAU. Natasha goes too far in depicting sexual degradation and violence. I know that sensitivities to these matters as depicted onscreen vary from viewer to viewer. But personally I found nothing inherently objectionable about Khrzhanovskiy and Oertel's directorial decisions. They are clearly trying to drive home the brutality of Stalinism, and in no way glorify the violence they display.

However, the extra-textual knowledge about the DAU project complicates matters. For instance, we know that Berezhnaya and Bigé had been living in the DAU compound for years, and we can clearly see that their onscreen sexual encounter is not simulated. At one point, a drunken Natasha flails around the canteen yelling, "Fuck this! Fuck the directors!" And it is not at all certain whether she is referring to the fictional Institute or Khrzhanovskiy and Oertel, the overlords who have orchestrated the situation she is (actually) in. 

We know that all the performers participated in DAU of their own volition, and could leave at any time. The question becomes less about free will and more about the breakdown of subjects under an all-enveloping regime, one that is intended to mirror the Stalinist state but places Art as the grand endeavor, rather than Communism. Did Khyzhanovskiy become a cult leader? At this point, we don't know, so we must take the film for what it is, until further notice.