Photo: Ivan Vyrypaev's Euphoria
The mythic and the absurd collide in Ivan Vyrypaev's Euphoria, every sun-burnished image of which is calculated for maximum, eye-popping effect. Long takes abound, as do sweeping-and-swooping 'copter shots over the raging waters and rolling fields of the Don steppes—these must be the "acres of wheat/cream of wheat" that Woody Allen's Boris Grushenko speaks of in Love and Death. Yet all the sumptuous visual beauty cloaks a decided beast of burden, for the stage-educated Vyrypaev's central trio of characters—Vera (Polina Agureyeva), Valery (Mikhail Okunev), and Pasha (Maxim Ushakov)—are ultimately little more than figures running through the landscape, slaves to a thinly conceived and executed love triangle, theatrical constructs through and through (call them Man, Woman, and Cuckold). Keith Uhlich
The mythic and the absurd collide in Ivan Vyrypaev's Euphoria, every sun-burnished image of which is calculated for maximum, eye-popping effect. Long takes abound, as do sweeping-and-swooping 'copter shots over the raging waters and rolling fields of the Don steppes—these must be the "acres of wheat/cream of wheat" that Woody Allen's Boris Grushenko speaks of in Love and Death. Yet all the sumptuous visual beauty cloaks a decided beast of burden, for the stage-educated Vyrypaev's central trio of characters—Vera (Polina Agureyeva), Valery (Mikhail Okunev), and Pasha (Maxim Ushakov)—are ultimately little more than figures running through the landscape, slaves to a thinly conceived and executed love triangle, theatrical constructs through and through (call them Man, Woman, and Cuckold). Keith Uhlich
