Siberia (Abel Ferrara, 2020) (Patreon)

NOTE: This review contains some thematic spoilers. You may want to go in cold for this one.

A film both fantastical and brutally clear-eyed, Siberia is a work that I honestly didn't think Abel Ferrara had in him. So often a poet of the lower depths, Ferrara shoots for the rafters here and mostly hits, producing a film that is unfashionably ontological in its exploration of basic questions of being. While Siberia begins as a mostly-silent portrait of a man (Willem Dafoe) operating a distant watering hole in the middle of the titular frozen wasteland, the film undergoes so many permutations that we are kept off-balance right up through the very end of the film. We never know if Dafoe represents an actual human being, whether he is alive or dead, which plane of existence is being depicted, or in fact, how many. 

A cinematic high-wire act that exhibits naked honesty in a glibly postmodern world, Siberia is a film that some will slag off as pretentious. But that is, I think, more a defense mechanism than anything else. This is a film that courts discomfort. As it explores the male psyche, Siberia also unravels it, demonstrating the dead end of sexist Romanticism and the hero myth. As a plunge into the ego, Siberia resembles Fellini; in terms of its externalization of magic and spirituality, it displays hints of Tarkovsky. But at the same time that Ferrara takes those projects seriously, he also shows that they are untenable. There is nothing to be done with the grand modernist subject, except to completely take him apart, burn him, and scatter the ashes.

Abel Ferrara's recent collaborations with Willem Dafoe represent a powerful new period in the filmmaker's career. While Dafoe is certainly an actor who can and will follow Ferrara out to the very limits of logic and restraint, he also provides a degree of discipline that helps to ground Ferrara's more expressionist tendencies. I hesitate to call it "gravitas," since Dafoe is always game for Ferrara's sillier conceits. In Go Go Tales, for example, he played club owner Ray Ruby as a grinning, pleading comic variant on the Cassavetes man, for whom masculinity is an existential performance with life-or-death stakes. 

But here, as in Pasolini, Dafoe evinces a kind of tired wisdom, an individual who has been granted vision beyond the scope of ordinary humanity. While his Pasolini was a Marxist philosopher who understood society as a system, and whose insights could not save him, Siberia's "Clint" is, depending on your interpretation, the next phase of that total being, or a complete inversion of it. A kind of Nietzschean "last man" who may not even be human, exactly, this figure (he's not really a character) blurs any and all lines between the personal and the allegorical. Even as he traverses the frozen tundra on his dogsled, we cannot know if he is negotiating physical space or plunging deeper into his own headspace.

Ferrara has said in interviews that Siberia was inspired by the notebooks of Carl Jung, written at the period when he was undergoing the crisis of faith that would lead to his ultimate break with Sigmund Freud. One does not need to know this going into the film, but it does possibly provide a degree of unity where one might only see chaos. Dafoe's avatar encounters memories from what appear to be a specific past -- meeting his dead father, re-encountering an ex-wife (Dounia Sichov) and a child (Anna Ferrara), and various meetings with prospective "teachers of the black arts." This would suggest that he is a character with a life story of some sort.

But elsewhere, Dafoe's actions and encounters are much more unpredictable. They follow a symbolic or dream logic. At times Siberia resembles the third season of Twin Peaks, in the sense that we have a figure who undergoes various otherworldly trials while also appearing to have a foot in a recognizable world. But other sections are more akin to the high-art endeavors of Matthew Barney or Bill Viola. The tundra, the forests, the ink-black darkness of the frame, all suggest a much more primal, atavistic space. And in one key moment early in the film, when Dafoe attempts to enter the basement of his bar and drops off a bare-faced cliff, the result is not unlike the "anabasis" from Lars von Trier's The House That Jack Built, only without any dark humor, and no Virgil as a guide.

This zone of uncertainty is not completely new for Ferrara. The final third of New Rose Hotel, for example, comes unmoored from space and time, to the extent that we are fairly certain that the "hotel" is a space of the mind. But Siberia is something more radical. Ferrara abjures the rugged masculinity that has featured throughout his oeuvre, even if only in parody. Here, as in Eastwood's Unforgiven, a man sets off on a task and loses all sense of self in the process. Sexual temptations, of a sort, avail themselves to him, but there is no pleasure of the flesh. There is only the wonder of creation, the pain of regret, the staggering reopening of the Oedipal wound. 

And through it all, Clint's sled dogs provide some of the film's only consistent reaction shots. They stare impassively, watching but not comprehending human pain. They are nature, and nature has no time for human indecision. When we know where we are going, they will help us get there. Until then, they are simply waiting for their supper.