After winning the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar in 2016 for his bracingly original boxing drama, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, gifted Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen graduates to the main competition with Compartment No. 6, an Arctic road movie that on the surface seems completely different. And yet these two films are flipsides of similar themes. The protagonist of Kuosmanen’s debut feature was a modest country baker serenely content with his place in the world, making him an odd fit for competitive sports. The new film revolves around a woman trying on the kind of cultured life she has tasted and admired, before ultimately finding peace through simpler self-knowledge and acceptance.
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Taking its title from the confined quarters of a second class sleeping car on a train from Moscow to the Arctic port city of Murmansk, this is a melancholic drama but also one that’s unexpectedly uplifting in its insights into human solitude and connection. As dour as it often seems with its reek of stale booze and cigarette smoke, there’s joy here for patient audiences willing to find it, and to forgo the easy consolations of a more conventional outcome.
Compartment No. 6
The time is unspecified but clearly in the post-Soviet era, with analog devices like a camcorder and a Walkman cassette player suggesting the 1990s still stuck in the ‘80s. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a student from Finland studying Russian in Moscow, where she has been renting a room from Irina (Dinara Drukarova), the high-spirited woman who has become her lover. A single scene at the start shows the consuming impression on unworldly, slightly awkward Laura of Irina’s endless parties in a charming old apartment full of music and art and books and laughter, where guests bat philosophical ideas back and forth as they toss back vodka shots.
One thought that stays with Laura is “It’s easier to understand the present if you study the past.” That notion is part of her desire, as a budding archeology enthusiast, to travel to Murmansk and see the ancient petroglyphs on the rocky coast. She and Irina originally planned the trip together, but when Irina was forced to cancel because of work, Laura decided to go anyway.
She finds herself sharing a train compartment with Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), an uncouth Russian miner whose obnoxious manner promises to make the long journey even longer. He’s antagonistic toward the tourist, drunkenly extolling the virtues of his homeland: “Russia is a great country! We beat the Nazis. The moon. We went there!” Laura kills time in the dining car and returns to find him smashed and rowdy, his behavior so offensive that she tries to slip the indifferent conductor (Julia Aug, marvelously affectless) some cash to find her another compartment. She even briefly considers the overcrowded bunks of third class. Only once Ljoha has passed out does she get some rest.
When the train stops in Saint Petersburg, she decides to abandon the trip and return to Moscow until a phone call indicates that she was just a moment in her lover’s life and Irina already is moving on.
Reboarding the train, Laura learns that Ljoha is going to Murmansk to work in the mines, but when she tries to explain her reasons for going there, he just seems perplexed, wondering what she could possibly gain from seeing a bunch of rock carvings. Her slightly awkward defensiveness hints already that there’s a performative aspect to Laura’s passion for archeology.
At an overnight stop on the journey, she reluctantly agrees to accompany Ljoha to the home of his foster mother (Lidia Kostina, a gem), who helps break the ice between the strangers as she shares her peculiar wisdom about women over a steady stream of hooch. But when Laura invites a guitar-playing Finnish traveler (Tomi Alatalo) to share their compartment on the next leg of the journey, it’s as if she’s broken some pact with Ljoha that was still being negotiated.
Loosely adapted by Kuosmanen with Andris Feldmanis and Livia Ulman from Rosa Liksom’s novel, the film blithely disregards the standard rulebook for this kind of road movie in which two strangers with little in common slowly come to understand and respect one another. A version of that does happen, but it’s not via the usual avenues of sexual attraction or even friendship in any formulaic sense.
The connection is more of a subcutaneous understanding that they are not so different. A scene in which Laura watches Ljoha goof around in the snow on a train platform like a big dumb kid reveals much about the true self beneath her attempts at cultivated sophistication, all of which is echoed beautifully later on.
The modulation of tone when the train trip nears its end is gracefully done, as a new closeness is formed only to have a moody distance separate them once again, and the terrific lead actors navigate the constant shifts between guardedness and openness with an emotional transparency that creeps up on you. The changes in Ljoha, especially, when Laura breaks through his isolation are quite moving, as is her devastation when her memories of her time in Moscow are taken from her.
The disappointment of arriving in Murmansk to find that all of Laura’s plans are suddenly impractical threatens to conclude the film on a downbeat note. But as he showed in The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, Kuosmanen’s storytelling has a fundamental generosity of spirit, tender though not sentimental.
Right up to the end, he keeps us unsure of where things are headed. The solution to Laura’s marooned unfulfillment comes with minor-key comedy in the completion of the physical journey across various elemental obstacles, but also subtle personal realizations about who she is, how she perceives the world around her and how she sees other people. There are no over-articulated epiphanies, just gentle, satisfying moments of internal illumination.
Cinematographer J-P Passi, who brought such evocative high-contrast texture shooting in black and white on the director’s first film, here works in the washed-out color palette of places suspended in time, also finding dexterous ways to keep the camera mobile in the tight spaces on the train. The visual aesthetic is more rough-edged this time but no less perfectly suited to the material. Sharp music choices include classic mid-‘70s Roxy Music at Irina’s party and fabulous late-‘80s French synth-pop (“Voyage Voyage” by Desireless) over the closing credits, amplifying the sense of horizons being expanded and barriers broken down. This is a strange, scrappy film, in its own way quite beguiling.
