When we’re first introduced to Sergei Dovlatov (Milan Maric), the darkly handsome hero of Aleksei German Jr.‘s eponymous biopic, he’s just woken up, after which he promptly informs his mother (Tamara Oganesyan) that he’s once again had a dream about Brezhnev. (Dovlatov notes that the two men discussed socialism and drank piña coladas.) Dovlatov isn’t much of a dissident—he wants nothing more than to live in peace, do his own writing, hang out with his artist pals, and maybe buy his daughter (Eva Herr) a German doll—but he’s discovering that in the Soviet Union of the early 1970s there’s no escape from politics, not even in the deepest recesses of his own mind.
Though Dovlatov would go on to become one of Russia’s most famous authors, in the brief period covered by German’s film, he’s still a complete nobody. Dovlatov is friends with lots of authors, including the dissident poet Joseph Brodsky (Artur Beschastny), but at this point in his life, he’s still trying to figure out how to turn his passion into a career. What he finds is that this is only possible by taking politically useful assignments: puff journalism about a lousy-looking propaganda film or a poetic ode to the glories of oil. Dovlatov isn’t so much opposed to this style of writing as he is completely incapable of producing it successfully, as his sardonic sense of humor has a way of creeping into even the most straightforward pieces.
Dovlatov covers only a few days in its main subject’s life, tracking him with fluidly languorous long takes through the literary milieu of Brezhnev-era Leningrad—a world of writers’ parties, newspaper offices, jazz clubs, and film shoots. German’s camera floats through these vividly recreated spaces as if in a dream, immersing us in this bygone time and place while simultaneously distancing us from it with a hazy, washed-out color palette and an unemphatic approach to drama that renders all the action muted and drowsy.
Through much of the film, Dovlatov is simply an observer, and Maric plays him as a man enjoying a private joke at the world’s expense, his lips always slightly curled into a wry smile. He’s an engaging presence, but everyone else in the film is too flatly depicted and ill-defined to pique our interest. Even Brodsky, who gets his own on-screen epilogue 20 minutes before the film ends, scarcely makes an impression. And this gets at the fundamental flaw in German’s style: He’s so fixated on choreographing large herds of people through one intricately choreographed sequence after another that he ends up reducing every character to the status of a mere extra. The film often plays like one of German’s father’s works on Percocet, demonstrating the same technical virtuosity but little of the elder’s manic intensity.
In fact, the film could be seen as a kind of tribute by German to his late father. There are a number of parallels between Dovlatov’s and the elder German’s lives: Both are distinctive artists who came of age in early-‘70s Leningrad and faced censorship and bemusement from the Soviet government for their work. One suspects that German’s familiarity with his father’s struggles to make the films he wanted—German Sr. completed only six films in his decades-long career, among them the titanic Hard to Be a God—contribute to Dovlatov’s sensitive and subtle depiction of political repression.
There are no book burnings or midnight raids on artists’ homes here. Dovlatov doesn’t encounter K.G.B. agents who tell him what to say. Rather, when he writes unpublishable material for a newspaper, the immediate effect is simply disappointment from the friend who hooked him up with the gig. And when he turns in sardonic articles about subjects he was meant to treat seriously, he’s met with offense—even hurt—by editors who genuinely believe in the ideals that Dovlatov is trashing. For German, truly courageous artists aren’t necessarily the ones who tackle the state head-on, but rather the ones who stay true to themselves even when no one likes what they have to say.
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