About the Film
Laura is a Finnish young woman who is in Moscow to study Russian Literature. There, she meets a very posh archeologist, Irina, and becomes completely mesmerised by her world, her intellectual friends, her elegant house full of old books, of art, music and nonchalant life. Laura agrees to go to Murmask to admire the recently discovered ancient petroglyphs.
Instead of sharing a romantic trip with capricious Irina, she gets trapped in a small train compartment with the foul-mouthed, perpetually drunk, annoyingly extroverted Lioha who is going in the same area to work in a mine. Obviously, his behaviour repulses Laura until a refined sensitivity begins to sand out his edges revealing a complex, gentle soul that Laura starts to appreciate.
Kuosmanen won the Un Certain Regard top prize in 2016 with his first film The Happiest Day In the Life of Olli Maki and, if with that film he gave fresh meaning to the tired tropes of boxing dramas, here he infuses new life and complex tenderness to the cuteuncute- become-friends road movies. Compartment no. 6 is apparently about a journey to distant (and sometimes inaccessible) physical places, but at its heart, it’s a gripping journey inside disparate minds and souls intersecting at just the right moment, when the gloom of circumstance, class and distance is too much to bear and unexpectedly put them out of balance leaving room for an otherwise impossible openness to mutual understanding. The film is graced by the extraordinary performances of Seidi Haarla (Laura) and Yuriy Borisov (Lioha) that build a strong empathic bond with the audience while they navigate the constant shifts between guardedness and openness with great emotional transparency and by the superb, incredibly unobtrusive camera work of Jani- Petteri Passi, who chooses for the film the washed-out color palette of places suspended in time. A time that is definitely not the one of Rosa Liksom’s novels, but that floats somewhere toward the end of the last millennium, when the Soviet Union was no longer there and the future was as foggy as Murmask shores.
Teresa Cavina