Yuri Bykov’s The Fool opens with a man beating up his wife and daughter, and gets progressively darker from there. Russian movies are not generally known for their frivolity, but Bykov’s output makes Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan, notable for its soul-crushing gloominess, look like an upbeat romcom by comparison.
The Fool is set in an unnamed provincial Russian town where the local elite cream cash off the budget while the majority of the population live in abject poverty. The eponymous fool is Dima Nikitin, a municipal plumber who realises that a huge apartment block is in such a sorry state it could collapse at any moment. Much to the horror of his parents, his wife, his superiors and the town’s administration, he embarks on a quest to have the building evacuated before disaster strikes. It does not go well, to put it mildly.
“Dima Nikitin is not really the main character,” says Bykov, during a late-night interview at a central Moscow cafe, a week before he travels to London for the first time to present the film at a special screening. “What’s interesting is how the people around Dima react to him; to the appearance of this saint-like being. He makes life difficult for everyone else with his moral rectitude.”
Bykov, 34, is an outsider in Moscow intelligentsia circles. He was born in a trailer in the Ryazan region, a few hours’ drive from Moscow. His mother worked in a factory and his father was a driver; his father left his mother and disappeared from his life when Bykov was six. He lived in the provinces until he was 21, when he moved to Moscow and studied acting. He began taking parts in theatres, but soon left because he found the life of a theatre actor to be “a kind of wild, alcoholic melancholy”. Instead, he worked as a clown in a children’s play club, saving money to put towards directing his first film, The Boss.
He does not speak English and his films feel very much rooted in his provincial Russian background. Prior to The Fool, he shot and starred in The Major, another ultra-dark work about a provincial cop who kills a child in a road accident and engages his colleagues to help him cover it up. It is a relentlessly miserable portrayal of humanity’s inability to act with moral clarity. Its protagonists are continually on the brink of making the right choices, but each time you think it’s about to transform into a redemption movie, it kicks you in the face and pulls you further into the abyss.
“All my films are basically about the choice between your conscience and your survival,” says Bykov. “I started looking closely at people when they’re watching the films. Some young people react enthusiastically, but older people either get angry or they can’t look, because they understand that they’ve faced these dilemmas before. When you show these characters to them, it’s like you’re hitting their sensitive spot. They couldn’t have done anything else in order to have survived, and people have got angry with me: they ask why I’m putting my characters into positions where there are no moral solutions; where they either have to ruin their lives or go against their conscience.”
Despite the overwhelming Russianness of their backdrops, both The Major and The Fool touch on profoundly universal issues: what we do when faced with difficult choices, and the propensity for small moral compromises to snowball and require ever more grotesque actions. Even in The Major, when some of the characters make utterly repugnant moral choices, they are not two-dimensional evildoers but ordinary people struggling with a rotten system and their own weaknesses. The world of Bykov’s films is less a Hobbesian jungle and more a dastardly chain of greed and cowardice, from which even those who want to escape cannot, because of the obligations and compromises they have made to others.
Bykov’s films have had hardly any release at the cinema in Russia, but he says The Fool garnered 20m views online. “I don’t like going to the cinema much myself,” he says. “Sometimes I’m forced to go with my girlfriend and sister – what was it I just saw … Batman against someone else? It was 3D and iMax; it was 3,500 roubles (£37) for three tickets and some popcorn! My parents earn 20,000 roubles a month. Who is going to pay that? I don’t care at all about money, I just care if people watch my films, even if it’s online.”
He is so keen to escape vulgar commercial concerns that he has recently set up his own production studio, and for his next film, The Factory, which he hopes to start shooting in November, he is the writer, director, producer and star all in one. (“As we say in Russia: ‘I’m a horse, I’m an ox, I wear tights, I wear socks.’”)
Doesn’t taking on so many roles mean he may lack healthy critical feedback? Bykov says the decision to produce as well as everything else comes from a desire to retain control of the artistic process. “I don’t like how the modern cinema industry is ordered, and I don’t like the whole institution of producers. The understanding of an impresario has disappeared, where the producer serves the interests of the artist, and the artist is the king. Now we have this consumer society where the artist is basically a joker, performing to the tune of commercial interests. This isn’t interesting for me.”
In addition to The Factory, Bykov wants to shoot a film set during the conflict in eastern Ukraine, but has suspended work on it for now. He says he has “very much pro-Russian views” on the conflict, and believes the Ukraine crisis involves “a grand clash of two geopolitical worldviews, the Russian and the western”. However, he did not want to take state funding to make the film, despite his views, for fear he would be expected to peddle a particular line.
It’s intriguing, given the vision of Russian society that comes across in his films, that in this putative clash with another societal model, he would be on the Russian side. When I put this to him he launches into an impassioned half-hour monologue, delivered loudly in the quiet cafe, that meanders around the assassination of JFK, the charge of the light brigade, the emancipation of the serfs in Russia and the global oligarchy. It boils down, in the end, to the idea that he might not like the Russian government, but he is still a patriot.
“Russia has suffered, its whole history, from feudal, cynical rule and total disrespect for its own people, and for this of course I am very critical of our authorities. But from the position of a citizen, I am pro-Russian. If tomorrow they say we have been attacked, then of course, without thinking, I will take up arms and defend my country.”
As midnight comes and waiters start hovering around our table, we circle back to the driving force of Bykov’s films. I ask what, if his characters really only have a choice between moral corruption or self-destruction, the message is. “I hope that maybe people who watch the films will think again whether it’s best to build their lives around pragmatism and mercenary concerns, or instead think about the fact that at some point in your life you’ll realise you’ve betrayed yourself and it’ll be hard to live with that.
“Of course, if forced to choose between their conscience and their survival, everyone will choose survival. But then what is our conscience worth? Humans’ capacity for change is what interests me most. Can we change? I hope we can, otherwise we’re screwed. Because if we can’t, then what can you believe in? And surely we have to believe in something. Especially in this country.”
• The Fool + ScreenTalk with director Yuri Bykov are at the Barbican, London, on 27 April. The screening is part of a new film series, New East Cinema, curated by The New Social in collaboration with Calvert 22.
