Film review: Compartment No. 6's oddball kind-of love story takes you on an engrossing ride to remote Murmansk
Unexpectedly moving tale of two lonely strangers forced to share a sleeper car has a lot to say about human connection
Compartment No. 6 screens at VIFF Centre from February 11 to 17
IT’S A MOMENT guaranteed to trigger any woman who’s travelled in an unfamiliar country alone. Kind-hearted Finn Laura (Seidi Haarla) finds out she’ll be sharing a cramped train compartment with the boorish Vadim (Yuriy Borisov) for the days-long trip from Moscow to Russia’s remote northern Murmansk. Head shaved and glowering, he slams a vodka bottle down on the table, pulls out his cigarettes, and proceeds to drink himself into oblivion.
From there, using intimate, handheld camera work straight out of Dogma 95, Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen reels you into an evolving relationship—to the point where you’ll be stupidly, hopelessly engrossed, for reasons you’ll be pondering long after the end of the journey.
The two outsiders are desperately lonely. Rumpled and awkward, Laura’s archaeology student has been pushed to take the trip by her more sophisticated female lover-professor in Moscow—who bails at the last minute and seems to be trying to get rid of her new bedmate. As for Vadim, he’s headed to Murmansk to make money doing gruelling work in the mine there.
They share a warped and childlike sense of humour. There’s a fantastic scene where Laura smirks watching the gawky Vadim smoking on the snowy platform at a train stop, throwing snowballs in the air and trying to karate-kick them till he slips and falls between the tracks.
What is this oddball kind-of love story really about? On one level, it’s a reminder you can never really judge someone by appearances, whether it’s Vadim, the brusk and intimidating uniformed train conductor, or a handsome, guitar-playing young Finn who joins our odd couple in Compartment 6.
For a deeper meaning, look to the film’s opening house party, where the Moscow academics Laura longs to impress pontificate endlessly about her needing to study Murmansk’s ancient petroglyphs to understand humanity. But the young Finn gains real insight by embracing the present with her new sleeper-car mate. She learns more about life by taking a risk on an overnight stop—following Vadim to an old Russian baboushka’s house to drink moonshine—than she ever would in textbooks or at archeological sites.
In true wry Kuosmanen style, it’s in the cold and unwelcoming Arctic port of Murmansk that Compartment No. 6 will fully thaw your heart. Vadim, who doesn't even know what petroglyphs are (he can't understand why she wants to see that "crap"), happily goes to the literal ends of the earth to help Laura find them. And in the pointless, existential quest amid a blizzard, the offbeat friendship takes final, fleeting form. You’ll be flooded with a weird, life-affirming warmth—and a big, much-needed laugh—all in what must surely rank as the world's most brutally depressing tourist destination.
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