Renata Litvinova's 2021 phantasmagoria The North Wind (2017) is one of many recent Russian films (other notable examples include Andrei Zviagintsev's Loveless [2017] and Boris Khlebnikov's Arrhythmia [2017]) in which a tormented family stands in for Russia at large. Isolated from the world in their formerly glorious but quickly decaying mansion, the family suffers from a debilitating repetition compulsion. The film shows a seemingly endless series of New Year's Eve celebrations (over the course of several decades from an indefinite point in time) that bear witness to the triumph of death and decay for a family that lost its future along with its ability to love.
The film's first New Year's Eve celebration signals what is to come: instead of a new beginning, the new year brings a tragic death. The family matriarch's son Benedikt loses his beloved fiancée Fanni to a plane crash. Keen to maintain the family tradition of celebrating New Year's Eve all together (Fanni was present at the previous celebration), Benedikt marries Faina, the sister of his tragically deceased fiancée. What follows showcases Faina's attempts and failure (echoing Kim Novak's character in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, 1958) to become a convincing stand-in for the original. Faina is resented to the point of hatred by her husband and in-laws for one irreparable flaw—she is alive. In a fit of rage, Benedikt explains why he cannot stand her: she smells, moves, breathes.
The world presented to us is the land of the dead; decay and corruption are ubiquitous, and those who take too long to die are helped along by aging and degrading family members. Benedikt drowns his grief in alcohol, matriarch Margarita (portrayed by Litvinova) accelerates her own death through an endless intake of champagne, nicotine, and a hallucinogenic gas administered intravenously. Her daughter-in-law requires more extreme measures: Margarita has Faina strangled to release her son from his misery. Immediately after the murder, Margarita, in a rhetorical move reminiscent of the discursive practices of the current administration, frames the victim as the perpetrator: “What a terrible woman! The things she's done to us!”
Repetition compulsion shapes the film on many different levels. The North Wind, dedicated to Litvinova's cinematic mother Kira Muratova, features numerous instances of manically repeated dialogue, characteristic of the master's films. The magnificently decomposing mansion features countless mirrors. The world of the film itself appears as if through the looking glass—it is a matriarchy that resembles extra-cinematic reality in at least one key aspect: here, too, transition of power seems impossible.
The film overall relies on numerous allusions and references. The two most revealing quotations come at the very end. In the final sequence, an homage to Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome (1989), Margarita wakes up in a metro car completing yet another loop on the Moscow ring line. Has it all been a bad dream? The sequence plays in reverse and forecloses optimistic scenarios: the future does not hold any promise or hope, only more of the same. Another sequence, closely preceding the last, encourages a similar reading. Here, Litvinova quotes the iconic final images of Larisa Shepit΄ko's Wings (1966). Benedikt, in drink-induced delirium, climbs into a plane and has the household servants push it around the field before suddenly taking off. But the sequence does not have the poignant ambiguity of Shepit΄ko's prototype that allowed viewers to interpret the flight as either escape or suicide. Benedikt imagines his fiancée next to him, but in his vision they are both still young—the only future here is the past.
The film appears equally pessimistic about cinema's own future. Despite reveling in the mesmerizing beauty of its depictions of decomposition and decay, The North Wind is quick to acknowledge that it, too, fails to reach the heights of the originals it echoes. In this admission, perhaps, lies the strength and courage of Litvinova's film.
