Twilight Portrait at New Directors / New Films

Simply put, there is no more polarizing and thought-provoking movie at this year's New Directors / New Films festival than Angelina Nikonova's Twilight Portrait. Even the most cursory description of the plot tells you why: Marina, a disillusioned and fairly well-off social worker in an anonymous Russian city, is raped by police officers, and she enacts revenge not with murder, as she originally plans, but with compassion, by moving in with one of them and slowly wearing away his emotional calluses.

Nikonova puts viewers in a terribly uncomfortable position: you can't help but want to see these men suffer, and you find yourself condemning Marina for trying to do what seems like the right thing by reforming these brutes into better people. It's a very hard movie to love or even enjoy, but it's impossible not to have an opinion about it: the Q-and-A was one of the most fractious we've ever seen. There are big talents here --- Olga Dihovichnaya, who wrote the script, gives a star-making performance, and Eben Bull's all-natural-light cinematography should be required study in film schools --- and we look forward, in a queasy, half-dreading sort of way, to seeing what they do next.

Photo: thanks