One
of the flood of rich sepia toned semi-silent movies about the birth of
the photographic and movie flagellation-and-freak-porn industry in turn
of the century St Petersberg that came out of Russia in the late ’90s.
Marvellous eyecandy, doing for monochrome cinematography what Ying
xiong/Hero (or even Zhang Yi Mou’s narratively superior earlier works
like Hong gao liang or Ju Dou) did for colour.
Like Hero again it isn’t really too encumbered by a story to distract
from the visuals either, and the characters, whilst piquant. are little
more than superficial archetypes.
As a bonus there’s none of the anti-black racism that mars some of
Balabanov’s other movies, although suspect he’s a bit of a chauvanist
git as well, which does come over in this.