PLAYING THE VICTIM

No run-of-the-mill job for Valja, who earns his living by getting stabbed, or thrown out of windows. He’s the corpse floating in the local swimming pool, the man with a bullet in the head at the sushi bar. His violent deaths are enacted for the Moscow police, whose new crime-solving method involves returning principal suspects to the scene of a homicide and making them reproduce the murder as realistically as possible in front of the crime’s witnesses. Extras are always needed, and with his innocent expression and theatrical gestures, Valja plays the helpless victim to perfection. In the real world, however, he pulls the strings. His singular combination of genius and lunacy is driving to despair his nearest and dearest – his girlfriend, his mother and her lover – but their efforts to curb his eccentric ways are futile. Quite frankly, they would like to get rid of him. Valja’s firm grip on the controls loosens only at night, when he dreams about his recently deceased father, the only human being of whom he was ever afraid. Director Kirill Serebrennikov’s screen adaptation of a play by the Presnjakov brothers is a skillfully narrated black comedy that mercilessly catapults the viewer into a world in which it seems wholly normal to stop at nothing in order to obtain one’s own interests. No wonder that the unstable police officer in charge of investigations strikes up a lament about the depravity of youth... With abundant allusions to society, the judicial system and politics, IZOBRAŽAJA ŽERTVU is an intelligent piece of filmmaking full of wit and rhythm.