DAU

At once immense and intimate, political, historical and personal, it’s the kind of shoot-for-the-moon feature that rarely happens anymore, and certainly not like this.

It is a mad, daunting, haunting film which somehow persuades you that Landau is the quintessential Bakhtinian-carnivalesque figure at the sulphurous centre of Soviet tyranny. How is it that this figure has spawned, is spawning, this massive, proliferating, multiplatform, multimedia phenomenon, so bizarre, so detached from what we think of as the accepted commercial rules for any artwork, that it is still difficult to believe it exists at all? What an enigma it is – and what an adventure.

What remains is not a comfortable watch, but it is vital and compelling cinema that’s ambitious in scale and uncompromising in vision. And as a portrait of an authoritarian regime in which power is expressed in the most vile and inhumane ways, it has an urgency that is all too contemporary.

It’s wearying to behold, troubling to gaze upon, and supremely satisfying as an artifact of an experimental artistic endeavor which could never be repeated.

Ultimately, Dau is a bold, engrossing historical epic that asks important questions about Russia’s political history and the growing entanglement of science and politics. Pacing issues towards the beginning and ending of “Dau” are its clearest flaw—making for a film that builds a towering, formidable narrative but isn’t always sure where it’s supposed to go next.

Its core aesthetic ideas are visible on the surface during its four-decade narrative, but they rarely cohere to conjure intrigue or dramatic rigor.