Review: MS Slavic 7 Grapples with the Existential in the Simplest of Ways

In its balance of a wispy narrative and long, quiet episodes of textual close reading, the film feels incomplete in a productive way.

MS Slavic 7
Photo: Lisa Pictures

For a film shot on the intangible medium of digital video, writer-directors Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell’s micro-budget investigative drama MS Slavic 7 is remarkably preoccupied with what its protagonist repeatedly describes as “objecthood,” or the value that archived materials carry beyond their ostensible content. In her repeated trips to a Harvard University library, Audrey (Campbell) obsesses over her deceased great-grandmother’s letters and poems, in which she hopes to find deeper traces of a woman she never knew, such as the nature of her relationship with the male poet with whom she regularly corresponded. However, her painstaking attention to primary sources, which the film dryly dramatizes in real-time passages of reading, photocopying and exegesis, seems as much an archaeological exercise as a literary study—a pursuit analogous to that of a film archivist, who can discern the life cycle of a reel through its permutations of decay.

Can physical materials be separated from their intended utility to tell audiences something about the time and place in which they were made, and especially the affective states under which they were produced? By attaching such concerns to a slim but nonetheless deeply felt narrative, Bohdanowicz and Campbell’s film, which is named after a library call number, ushers these matters out of the realm of the esoteric and into the immediate and personal.

In an ingenious sleight of hand not immediately apparent to the viewer, Audrey is positioned as a stand-in for Bohdanowicz, whose own extended family appears in a series of group gatherings that punctuate Audrey’s solitary research excursions. Shot largely in disembodied close-ups and telephoto long shots, these scenes strike a cold, detached tone that’s nowhere more apparent than in Audrey’s increasingly combative interactions with an aunt (Elizabeth Rucker) who opposes her niece’s research for reasons clearly related to her own stake in the family estate (though which she cloaks in the language of journalistic ethics). These familial tensions are implicit in Audrey’s stoic, seemingly despondent presence, and go some way toward explaining her desire to seek emotional succor in the past.

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If Audrey uses her research as a way to assuage her alienation from her family, there are also intimations that her larger social life is also depleted. The few people who Audrey interacts with beyond her callous aunt are either unfriendly, as is the case with the terse librarian (Aaron Danby) who dispassionately recites to her the institution’s rules and regulations, or barely responsive. In one static-camera setup repeated three times over the course of MS Slavic 7’s seemingly compressed chronology, Audrey recaps her findings and reflections to a silent and unseen interlocutor off frame—if there even is one there.

As examples of extended, off-the-cuff intellectual deliberation, these monologues represent the peak of Campbell’s nuanced performance, yet their content—considerations of Audrey’s Polish heritage, romantic life, and relationship to nature—is obscured somewhat by the filmmakers’ ambiguous staging. Suspicions that Audrey is speaking only to herself are partially resolved in a sudden third-act “twist” that recontextualizes the question of her social life and proposes an alternate dimension to her research, but many questions linger.

In its balance of a wispy narrative and long, quiet episodes of textual close reading reminiscent of the work of Straub-Huillet, MS Slavic 7 feels incomplete in a productive way, giving us just enough of the outline of a young woman’s psychological existence to project the rest into the implied absences in her great-grandmother’s poetry and prose. As Audrey searches for a spiritual bond with her long-dead ancestor, Bohdanowicz and Campbell reflect the commingling of past and present in the aesthetics of the film itself, which has the hard, sharp neutrality of digital photography while also incorporating blasts of baroque organ music (an anachronism it shares with Ricky D’Ambrose’s similarly academic Notes on an Appearance).

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Are the delicacies of Audrey’s research project—in its meticulous emphasis on the artisanal, the implicit, and the unreproducible—somehow antithetical to our modern world? And does that dissonance help explain Audrey’s own sense of being out of step? In a breezy 64 minutes, MS Slavic 7 evokes these existential riddles with just the simplest of means.

Score: 
 Cast: Deragh Campbell, Aaron Danby, Elizabeth Rucker, Mariusz Sibiga  Director: Sofia Bohdanowicz, Deragh Campbell  Screenwriter: Sofia Bohdanowicz, Deragh Campbell  Running Time: 64 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019

Carson Lund

Carson Lund's debut feature as a DP and producer is Ham on Rye. He also writes for the Harvard Film Archive and is the frontman of L.A.-based chamber pop duo Mines Falls.

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