A.k.a. Kak ya provyol etim letom
D/S: Aleksey Popogrebskiy. P: Roman Borisevich. Cast: Sergey Puskepalis, Grigoriy Dobrygin. UK dist (DVD/Blu-ray): New Wave.
A tight Russian character piece directed by Aleksey Popogrebskiy, set in a remote Arctic weather station staffed only by two men: Sergey (Sergey Puskepalis), a tough, gruff frontiersman and ex-army type, boss-man of the station, and Pavel (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a feckless young student there to gain some work experience during the summer vacation. It’s a bleak spot, surrounded by ice floes; all they have to do is take periodic readings from the array of weather-measuring devices and report back their data to base. A typical teenager, Pavel spends much of his time daydreaming, listening to his iPod or playing violent video games. Sergey, a product of the old Soviet regime, is made of sterner stuff and isn’t above giving the young whippersnapper a clout or two round the ear to buck his ideas up. A real odd couple, the two rub along okay until Sergey decides to go AWOL for a spot of trout fishing (a welcome change from walrus meat) and Pavel is left alone to take the meteorological readings and contact HQ by radio. Surprise surprise, Sergey’s boat is barely out of sight when an urgent call comes through on the RT: it seems Sergey’s wife and children have all been killed in a tragic accident. Pavel is left with the task of breaking the news to Sergey on his return, but – fearful that he’s a shoot-the-messenger kind of guy – the lad procrastinates, with disastrous consequences.
A quietly gripping character study, How I Ended This Summer is a hard film to summarise without making it seem deadly dull. Atmosphere is everything: the landscape of mist, grey hills and icy water is as much a character as the two protagonists. Their daily routines are described with economy and precision: the long trudge across desolate terrain in arctic gear, a rifle to protect against the occasional polar bear, the careful reading of the instruments (including, alarmingly, a fearsome-looking device holding a lethal radioactive isotope); the trek to the fuel dump, to drain a little more diesel from the rusting graveyard of drums, alive with mosquitoes; the tedious recitation of numbers and data over the radio to the faceless voices at HQ. These mechanical rituals are abruptly cancelled when Pavel finally blurts out the news to Sergey – and suddenly, thanks to a catastrophic misunderstanding, the naive teen finds himself fighting for his life.
The final act is cleverly handled, with enough ambiguity of behaviour from Sergey to render Pavel’s subsequent descent into panic credible. There’s a touch of Jules Verne’s Light at the Edge of the World during the later passages: Pavel scrambles for safety to a deserted wreck of a house further along the coastline, cleans out the chimney and steals seagull eggs to eat, even – most disturbingly – developing a facility for guerrilla warfare when he steals and irradiates Sergey’s batch of trout… The two leads are excellent, the measured pacing ideal for exploring their very different characters; How I Ended This Summer is recommended unreservedly.