At the start of the third act of Philipp Yuryev’s The Whaler Boy, Leshka (Vladimir Onokhov) has fled his remote village in Chukotka, Russia’s easternmost province, in a stolen whaling boat. Believing that he’s killed his best friend, Kolyan (Vladimir Lyubimtsev), in a fistfight, the teenager hopes to cross the Bering Strait to Alaska and make his way to Detroit, where the camgirl he’s fallen in love with, HollySweet_999 (Kristina Asmus), supposedly lives. Run aground on a tiny island, he encounters a group of poachers, one of whom leads him to a high vantage point and points to the left. “There is Alaska,” he says. Then he points to the right: “That is Chukotka. Russia: the future. America: the past.”
In a film that up to this point has framed the United States not only as Leshka’s future, but the source of futurity itself, this moment comes as a shock. Of course, the International Dateline separates calendar dates so that, technically, it can be Monday in America and Tuesday in Russia. Even so, on another level the inversion hints at a hard swerve in tone and even genre that ends with disillusionment for the film’s teenage protagonist. At the same time, it resonates with other scenes throughout The Whaler Boy that similarly demolish expectation.
In the film’s opening credit sequence, for instance, a montage of Americana—neon-lit gas stations, car washes, and burger joints—set to Johnny Cash’s “Story of a Broken Heart” ends in a grungy alleyway as HollySweet_999 trudges to work. She enters a building with a “Live Nudes” sign and prepares backstage for her cam session, applying a persona with her make-up.
In The Whaler Boy, coming of age is inseparable from disillusionment. Its first two acts serve up a realistic depiction of indigenous Chukchi life, in a village where whaling is the prime occupation. This traditional way of life, already altered by modern whaling boats, rifles, and the like, is further disrupted by the advent of the internet, giving boys like Leshka and Kolyan access to cam sites and fueling a fantasy of foreign women as uninhibited yet unattainable blondes surrounded by luxury. Leshka’s fixation with HollySweet_999 balloons into dreams of learning English and escaping Chukotka. For him, she represents not merely sex, but an ideal life of love and opportunity waiting just across the border—Leshka’s own Moby Dick. In the background, his grandfather (Nikolay Tatato) repeatedly predicts his own death.
Even as Leshka and Kolyan’s world contracts to the size of laptop screen, The Whaler Boy takes an intimate and anthropological look at the characters’ surroundings. Alongside footage of an actual whale hunt, bloody spume and all, an upside-down image of the village street turns out to be from Leshka and Kolya’s perspective as they hang from a makeshift jungle gym. An abundance of long shots accentuates the tundra glowing with Arctic light, while extreme close-ups on HollySweet_999’s online face break it down into component pixels.
As Leshka sets out on his journey, the film begins to traffic in fairy-tale imagery. Flickering in firelight, the poachers’ faces turn into masks of bone. A border patrolman (Arieh Worthalter) unexpectedly sends Leshka on his way with a jar of marshmallows, jet-puffed and without substance. A graveyard of whale skeletons materializes far inland. It’s as if Leshka has accidentally crossed a border into the underworld rather than Alaska. Except that all this surreality builds toward another, climactic reversal, ending in Leshka’s final disenchantment. Had it lacked this about-face, The Whaler Boy would be another tedious examination of boyhood sexuality buoyed only by the film’s cinematically unfamiliar setting. Instead, it becomes a vivid rumination on the fuzzy border between fantasy and reality.
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