Director Kirill Serebrennikov’s film BETRAYAL, seen at the current Sydney Film Festival, is an engrossing and fascinating film.
The film opens in a doctor’s surgery where we meet the two main characters. A doctor, credited as She, and played with haunting detachment by Franziska Petri, examines the heart of He, played with strength and sensitivity by Dejan Lilic. During the examination she tells him that their spouses are having an affair. Unsurprisingly the heart monitor has an intense reaction.
As with many aspects of this film many details are not explained. How he happened to come to this hospital for a check-up and how she made the connection between her patient and her husband’s lover is left to the audience to decide. Nevertheless it turns out that She, the doctor, is an excellent sleuth and shows her disbelieving patient where the lovers meet, the bench they sit on, the hotel they have coffee in and the hotel room where their liaison takes place.
BETRAYAL has a film noir sensibility but it is set in an icy urban Russian landscape. Inexplicable events and Franziska Petri’s disturbing presence also make the film feel like an understated horror movie. Adventurous camera techniques such as extreme off centre framing and frequent use of reflections draws the viewers eyes away from the normal focus points just as your attention is drawn away from the superficial storyline in search of what is really going on in this film. An early fatal car accident has only minimal impact on the central story. It is unclear as to why a policewoman wants He to kiss her. Guna Zarina’s fantastic policewoman’s role hovers between ruthless, brilliant and bureaucratic.
At one level this film is a love story and an examination of betrayal and the responses of the protagonists to their situations but the unsettling mood created and various unexpected and unexplained events make this a very thought provoking film.
Other cast members are the beautiful Albina Dzhanabaeva, and Yakov Levda. The script was written by Natalia Nazarova and Kirill Serebrennikov and there was excellent cinematography by Oleg Lukichev.