I'd heard this film (which is Russia's submission for the oscars this year and also the final film I caught at the Leeds Film Festival - http://www.leedsfilm.com/ ) described as the Russian version of Amelie and while a description like that will get a lot of people to want to see it (the screening I was at tonight was sold out and had people queued up round the street corner causing a delay of 20 minutes to get everyone in) it's more broadly similar in content rather than the tone and style which made that French effort such a hit.
I really wanted to like this film and looked forward to it immensely, staying overnight in Leeds solely to see it but incredibly there was a half hour period during it where all I wanted to do was walk out of the cinema. The opening couple of reels show a young Alisa and her living with her mother and granddaughter, it's almost unbearable as the young actress is just atrocious and the quirky style so manufactured and obvious. After we skip abruptly to her in Moscow at the age of 17 it really hits a stumbling block - the girl (Masha Shalayeva) isn't speaking and just schlepping around silently doing terrible jobs while the same incessant pop tunes blare in the background.
Halfway through the film the object of her affections arrives and that does save the film from being a complete bust because ... she is finally given something to do (another 10 minutes of it going the way it was and I would have walked out for the first time ever). The worst thing about this is that beforehand the girl introducing the movie (who also introduced Blind Loves the other day, seemingly more intent on name dropping what European festivals she's been to than anything else) had said how refreshing it was in its portrayal of women - well, if portraying women as characterless shells being shallowly defined by exterior things such as their job or their desire for a man (which is one of the BIG problems about this film) is refreshing then we're seriously in trouble.
The plot is threadbare and meandering, repetetive and predictable. There is no insight to the character (we have no idea what drives her or what she is feeling in certain situations), instead relying on cute smiles to get you to like this creature who is really a complete non-entity. I remember distinctly thinking "why don't I care about this girl? She looks interesting, if she was someone I knew I'd care for her but there's nobody to know in this girl". The end has pretensions of grandeur but it says precisely nothing relevant or interesting. It's just shock value and attempted audience-manipulation and it quite frankly has not even begun to earn that in the preceeding hour and three-quarters.
So this is a poor film that is unrecommendable, right? Sadly no. It went down very well with the audience that I saw it with, enjoying frequent laughs which absolutely perplexed me as I didn't crack a smile once during the whole runtime. I think a lot of people who see this film will like it, why? Because taste is an individual thing and the problems I had with it a lot of people either won't agree with or won't see as problems. This is a case of style-over-substance, but with the style being not much to write home about. This is getting an extra screening this weekend at the Vue in Leeds, as is Blind Loves and it's rather sad that they're only getting more showings because they sold out, when the best film I saw of the three (Colours of Memory) didn't and will remain less seen because it didn't have the original curiosity value of the other two.