Film buffs will no doubt be debating whether it"s traces of Tarkovsky"s "Stalker" or his "Solaris" that show up in "The Ugly Swans." The former comes through with its sense of a closed, strange community of "others" (the mysterious zona), the latter with its elegiac sense of a protagonist coming back into contact with a past life.

The opening scenes of Lopushansky"s film strongly recall "Solaris," as hero Viktor Banev (played by Ukrainian-born Canada resident Gregory Hlady, who was a strong presence in the Moscow theater world during perestroika, both as a director and as an actor in Anatoly Vasilyev"s company) starts a strange journey, to continue throughout the course of the film, with a visit to a Polish writer. The strangeness is amplified by the fact that his host is a gun-brandishing dwarf. An early apocalyptic hint comes from the fires that burn continuously on the sides of the railroad he travels by.

Banev"s ultimate destination is the apparently closed town of Tashlinsk, where UN forces are in control after some sort of unexplained catastrophe, and to which he arrives as an accredited observer. On his way, he has a meeting in Moscow with his ex-wife, and it becomes clear that he has a personal motivation for the journey, too: Their daughter, Ira (Rimma Sarkisyan), is part of the strange community that has occupied the beleaguered town.

Right about here, things start getting really strange. Ira is part of a group of specially gifted children who are under the care of even weirder characters called mokretsy (translated as "aquatters" in the film"s program notes), who are either aliens or mutants with masked, metallic faces. Whether or not they"re left over from some Soviet experiment, the aquatters are now part of a clone-like group that looks distinctly sinister. This, incidently, is a considerable difference from the Strugatskys" original storyline, as Lopushansky pointed out at the film"s premiere at Cine Fantom on Wednesday; the film was adaptedly rather loosely from the book, although it was done with Boris Strugatsky"s full consent.

As international negotiators debate their way to the finale -- with a small but powerful role from longtime Sokurov actor Leonid Mozgovoi -- Banev tries to engage with the world of the "others." Meanwhile, it rains the entire time, coming down in absolutely drenching quantities that suggest global climate change is part of the wider issue (credited support from Green Cross International and the Gorbachev Foundation backs up such a view).

The film"s visuals are dominated by decaying Soviet-era townscapes, with surviving street signs from an earlier existence, all of it eerily lit in dominating red tints as the rain pours down everywhere. Full credit is due to all involved on the technical front, from cinematographer Vladislav Gurchin to the art and costume designers.

The music by Andrei Sigle, who also produced the film (as he has done for recent Sokurov projects), goes beyond the parameters of a standard film score, to the point where it"s more a case of original sound design than anything else. Together with all the images, it leads up to a dark, lonely, depressing but moving closure.

"The Ugly Swans" has many more elements than any such brief summary can begin to suggest. Is it a "final warning to humanity," as Hlady has said, or "a passionate sermon against the xenophobia and hatred for people who are different that plagues our society today," as one of his fellow actors is quoted as saying? Lopushansky, meanwhile, wrote of an "encounter of mystery -- a mystery so enormous that you are gripped by an inexplicable terror as an abyss opens up under your feet."

The film is probably all that and more. It"s also aesthetically outstanding and emotionally moody in a way that"s very hard to gauge. Eliciting no simple reaction, it nevertheless demands attention. Tarkovsky would have been proud.

LINKS

• Konstantin Lopushansky
• THE UGLY SWANS

Moscow Times, by Tom Birchenough