Compartment No. 6 Review: An Empathetic Depiction of Cross-Cultural Understanding

The road movie is traditionally built on the tension between the freedom of the open highway and the confinement of the car. While its characters can theoretically go anywhere they want, they’re also stuck together. Director Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No. 6 dispenses with the illusion of openness, as this road movie is actually a rails movie. But it still thrives off of an ironic juxtaposition of character and environment, setting its story of forced interpersonal bonding against the difficulties of a long train journey through post-Soviet Russia. Compartment No. 6’s lightly comic depiction of individuals at odds coming to a mutual understanding and even affection for one another may not be unique in outline, but the film is distinguished by Kuosmanen’s empathetic touch.

The big tell that Compartment No. 6, adapted from Rosa Liksom’s 2011 novel of the same name, is set in the late ’90s is the now-obsolete digital camcorder bandied about by the film’s main character, Laura (Seidi Haarla). She’s a rudderless Finn living in Moscow who’s decided that she needs to see the petroglyphs inscribed on rocks on the shores of Murmansk, the largest town above the Arctic Circle. The camera makes her stand out in the environment of post-Soviet Russia, with its sense of technological stagnation. Vestiges from another time, from the wood paneling on the interior of the rickety passenger train to the grimy, old-fashioned pay phones she uses during stops to anxiously call her aloof girlfriend, Irina (Dinara Drukarova), back in Moscow, suggest that the milieu of the film is stuck in the past.

But Compartment No. 6 undoes our initial impression of the contrast between the main character and her environment. Through the development of her relationship with her random compartment mate, Vadim (Yuriy Borisov), new dimensions not only of Laura but of the film’s seemingly drab world emerge. We first understand Laura as the character who’s being put upon, by her girlfriend’s hoity-toity academic friends back in Moscow, by the stern personnel she encounters on the train, and by Vadim, whose initial encounter with her involves a drunken, invasive touch when he’s trying to teach her a dirty Russian word, which understandably sends her running to the refreshments car for some solitude.

While these conditions are undoubtedly harsh, the viewer gradually gleans that Laura is prone to closing herself off to the world, as suggested by the way she seems to be hiding in a safe-seeming but ultimately illusory relationship. She clings hard to Irina, whose signals that she’s not that into their relationship include bowing out of the trip to Murmansk at the very last minute. Whenever the train makes a stop, Laura desperately calls back to check in on the girlfriend who may not think of herself as one. And to avoid Vadim while riding in the train compartment with him, Laura tellingly spools up footage on her camera of Irina’s social events—where, as we see in the first scene, she had actually felt uncomfortable and out of place. Everything looks better in the muted tones of 8mm video, it would seem.

Between Irina’s cool disinterest and a gruff train porter’s (Yuliya Aug) utter lack of sympathy for her predicament inside the compartment, Laura reluctantly opens herself to the sobered-up Vadim’s overtures of friendship, even going so far as following him on a visit to his babushka (or just a babushka, as it’s never made entirely clear) during an overnight stop. Borisov gives a standout performance as the slightly shady but good-hearted Vadim, whose vodka-fueled boasting may be its own kind of shield against the outside world. As both Laura and Vadim open up, a mutual affection rapidly grows that’s made more believable by the way that Borisov fills in his character’s rough edges with a quiet woundedness.

In terms of its story about a difficult trip and the friends made along the way, Compartment No. 6 doesn’t reinvent the (rail) wheel, but the way it expands the story into one of cross-cultural understanding while also zeroing in on its complex characters makes it one of the most interesting variations on the “it’s the journey not the destination” narrative. The train is a somewhat unaccustomed setting for the formation of a friendship through trial, but as it turns out for both Laura and the viewer, there can be advantages to being railroaded.