Film

Compartment No 6: ‘In Russia everything is a bit bigger. The characters are a bit larger’

Juho Kuosmanen’s film places a Russian corner boy on a train with a Finnish student

‘This is a film about emotions and people, not politics’

Tara Brady's face
Tara Brady
Sat Apr 2 2022 - 05:00

Compartment No 6, the second feature from Finnish filmmaker Juho Kuosmanen, is already a big deal, having won the Grand Prix award, the Fipresci Award from the International Federation of Film Critics, and the special mention prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes 2021.

This marks the director’s third major success on the Croisette; his short film The Painting Sellers won the Cannes Cinéfondation in 2010; his debut feature, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, won Un Certain Regard in 2016.

It’s an impressive track record for a practitioner who claims his films are dull.

“Basically, they are boring films,” jokes Kuosmanen. “They are dramas. There are no major events. They are nothing like a roller coaster. We are also asking quite a lot from the audience. You never know when you make films because all the emotions are quite abstract. You can’t even verbalise it to actors sometimes. Even after it’s edited and the sound design, and it’s ready to be screened, you don’t know how people will see it. I was very happy when we finished this movie. I think that we managed to make the film that we wanted to make. But of course, I was very worried how it would play. Will people share these emotions?

READ MORE

“If they don’t, will they care what happens next? The two people are the plot.”

Juho Kuosmanen: ‘This is a film about emotions and people, not politics.’ Photograph: Thomas Niedermueller/Getty for ZFF

As Compartment No 6 opens, it’s the late 1990s and Laura (Seidi Haarla), a Finnish archaeology student, is at the end of a love affair with her Muscovite professor, Irina (Dinara Drukarova). Both research and rejection underpin Laura’s journey from Moscow to Murmansk, where she hopes to study the Kanozero petroglyphs, rock drawings dating back some 6,000 years. Her journey is a rough-and-ready one. “No spitting on the floor,” warns the train conductor ominously. She is further dismayed to discover that she has to share the bunk compartment of the title with a tough-looking, chain-smoking, sausage-eating, shaven-headed Russian named Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov), who turns out to be both kinder and more clever than his gopnik appearance. What transpires is a love story, albeit one without romance or sex.

“The gopnik is really a Russian thing,” says the filmmaker of the corner boy archetype beloved by makers of memes. “Ljoha has this whole macho idea about the role of a man. But it’s not so strange. We all have those same guys. I think everybody is raised around someone like that. It’s just that in Russia everything is a bit bigger and the characters are a bit larger.”

Novel deviations

Kuosmanen, who has also directed avant-garde theatre and opera with conductors Sakari Oramo and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, first became intrigued by Rosa Liksom’s novel Compartment No 6, when he read extracts over his wife’s shoulder in 2011.

He was immediately taken with the bond that forms between strangers on a train but, when it came to adapting, he was keen to tweak certain aspects. In Liksom’s source novel, the heroine boards the trans-Mongolian express in the later years of the Soviet Union, and makes the journey to Ulan Bator. The characters, too, were differently aged. Ljoha was a miner in his 50s. Borisov was cast because of his remarkable chemistry with Haarla; she, in turn, was cast, having worked on the film as a translator for some time, before the film-makers realised their heroine was already on the payroll.

I wanted the film to stay in the past because I didn't want there to be smartphones, so the characters have real interactions while they are locked in that train for hours

“We changed the chronology a bit from the novel, which is set in the late 1980s,” says the director, who co-wrote the script with Andris Feldmanis and Livia Ulman. “Our film takes place a decade later. I wanted the film to stay in the past because I didn’t want there to be smartphones, so the characters have real interactions while they are locked in that train for hours. And there were practical changes because when we were scouting locations and tracks, the track from St Petersburg to Murmansk was a train track, which is a bit easier to shoot. It’s closer to some Petersburg where you have all the film crew and where you have all the equipment for renting. And then I felt that, okay, if we are going to shoot on this track, then why not set the story on this track? It’s a much shorter trip. And it tells so much about the whole country, while the novel is dealing with the Soviet Union. We’re not in the Soviet Union any more. And I also like the fact that the journey ends on the coast and not in the Mongolian desert. It’s much easier to feel free and to fill your lungs with fresh air in the Arctic Ocean.”

Back on track

Save for a few exceptions – notably Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, which was shot in the “palace-lined, desert region of Rajasthan in the northwest corner of the subcontinent” with the assistance of India’s Northwestern Railways – films set on trains are typically not filmed on trains. Narrow Margin, Richard Fleischer’s impeccable 1950s thriller, to name one, never made it out of Santa Fe’s Railroad Depot.

I had to watch the scenes on a monitor because there was no space near the actors. It's not the way I like to direct. But I fell in love with the project

Compartment No 6’s unusual moving carriage-bound shoot was partly inspired by multiple viewings of Das Boot and further crafted by cinematographer J-P Passi, who hails from the documentary sector. The production rented old trains from Russia’s transport authority, cars that might have been in use in the 1990s and were, by the time of the shoot, nearing (if not past) their scrappage date. Shooting days required 10- and 12-hour schedules during which the train typically moved in a circle. These meticulous, authentic details make for an arresting spectacle and intimate experience, even if the tight spaces significantly slowed the shoot.

“When anything in the compartment needed to be adjusted, we had to take everybody out,” says Kuosmanen. “I had to watch the scenes on a monitor because there was no space near the actors. It’s not the way I like to direct. But I fell in love with the project – a lot – because of the idea of making a film on a train in Russia. It’s the most cinematic ingredient of the project. I wouldn’t change it for anything. It gives me personally so much satisfaction to make use of the transport and the space and the sound and feeling of being on a train. You can build them up and you can fake them in the studio and you can act everything against a green screen. But I think that would be a wasted world and a waste of time, not to use the existing things. I know using those things affects everything. It’s really easy for me to say that it wouldn’t be the same film without them, and we wouldn’t be the same people if we had been shooting in a studio and not in Russia.”

No Russophobia

The director’s previous feature, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, scoped out Finland’s cowed relationship with America, through the boxer of the title. (The film concerns Mäki’s World Boxing Association featherweight championship title fight against contemporaneous US champion Davey Moore). Refreshingly, particularly in the current climate, Compartment No 6 displays no Russophobia and no interest in any historical conflicts between Kuosmanen’s native Finland and Russia.

“It was something to avoid,” says the filmmaker. “I wanted to focus on these two human beings. I felt that if people start to think about, first of all the Soviet Union, or Russia, as a country, or political events, they will miss all the emotions that film has. They’ll start to analyse it, and they won’t feel it. This is a film about emotions and people, not politics.”

Compartment No 6 opens on April 8th