In a flourish of passive-aggressive self-pity and spite, Vladimir Putin recently claimed that Russian culture was being cancelled in the west. The release of this excellent film proves him wrong: a movie about a Russian character behaving menacingly to someone from Finland, Russia’s vulnerable neighbour, and yet being romantically redeemed. There is a bone-chilling cold in the film’s location – Murmansk in Russia’s remote north-west – but a wonderful human warmth and humour in this offbeat story of strangers on a train and of national characteristics starting to melt.
It comes from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, whose 2016 film The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki was a lovely comedy about a real-life Finnish boxing champ in the 1960s. His new film is adapted from a novel of the same name by Finnish artist and author Rosa Liksom, and concerns a young Finnish student of archaeology, Laura (Seidi Haarla) who is in Moscow sometime in the early 90s; she has begun an impulsive affair with her professor, Irina (Dirana Drukarova). With Irina’s encouragement, and perhaps because this older woman does not care to have her hanging around much longer, Laura has resolved to make the tough rail journey up to Murmansk where she wants to view the petroglyphs – mysterious rock drawings, thousands of years old.
Sweet-natured, open-hearted Laura gets on this uncomfortable train in the freezing wintry cold, where she finds that she must share compartment number 6 with Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), a boorish, drunk young guy who is on his way to get a job in a coal mine in Murmansk and is openly abusive, misogynistic and philistine about Laura’s plans. And her phone calls back to Moscow reveal that Irina isn’t exactly pining for her.
Of course, it isn’t too much of a stretch to see that after their meet-uncute, the relationship of Ljoha and Laura is going to thaw, although the obviousness of this trope has lessened in the last month. The romance that flowers between these two young people is in parallel with the romance of a long rail journey, and this is a very non-American equivalent of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise movies. Ljoha’s scowling face and shaven, bullet head make him look a tough guy at first, but it isn’t long before we see him as a vulnerable little boy, never more so than when with Laura welcomes another Finnish guy to share their carriage - a self-admiringly sensitive type who insists on singing and playing his guitar. Ljoha is fiercely sceptical and resentful of this preening interloper, and he is right to be.
In the end, no one wants to help Laura find these petroglyphs that she has set her heart on and travelled so far to see, and it is Ljoha himself who has to step up. Yes, this is a Russian without a Z on his clothes or in his heart, and of course the larger point is that of course, there are millions of Ljoha’s fellow citizens who cannot be tarred by the malign mediocrity of Putin’s chauvinism. There is charm and gentleness in this scene and the movie as a whole.
• Compartment No 6 is released on 8 April in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema.
• This article was amended on 25 April 2022 to correct the name of male lead character Ljoha, from Vadim as an earlier version mistakenly said.
