Like Werner Herzog’s half-satirical, half awestruck documentary Encounters at the End of the World (2007), Aleksei Popogrebsky’s Kak ya provyol etim letom (How I Ended the Summer) offers a surprising take on life in the polar regions. The object of Herzog’s satire was the eccentricity bordering on madness that characterises those who live in these isolated regions. Popogrebsky’s fictional film satirises Pavel, the young assistant at a weather station. While his superior, experienced polar resident Sergei, is heavy and dour as a bear, Pavel is playful and carefree as a fawn. Sergei has the haircut and brusque demeanour of a convict, while Pavel has an urbanite’s earring and gelled hair. Sergei enters observations in the log book by hand, and has to have the ‘smiley’ from his wife’s text message explained to him. Meanwhile, like an unwilling adolescent dragged on a nature trip by his parents, Pavel clings resolutely to the comforts of modern technology. Inside the weather station, when he is not dealing with digitizing the weather records, he hunches over the computer playing games; when he is outside, the music blasting through the headphones of his MP3 player becomes a bizarre soundtrack to the supremely isolated landscape in which he idly plays. When Pavel oversleeps and misses relaying the latest observations over the CB radio, Sergei rails at him for failing to understand how important the station’s work is. He tells him that over the years many people have endured great hardship and sacrifice at the station; he calls Pavel a ‘tourist’ who just wants something to write in his school essay on ‘how I ended the summer’.
Popogrebsky achieves the considerable feat of creating an engaging film despite the fact that it is set in an isolated place with just two characters. The routines that mark life at the weather station are almost always comforting rather than boring: the scratching of the pencil on the notepad as the latest observations are recorded, the shaking of the thermometer to re-calibrate it; the identifiers and numbers that are read out over the CB radio, as meaningless as the shipping forecast to many people, yet just as pleasing to the ears. The contrast between Sergei and Pavel is amusing, but it also immediately establishes a tension: from the first scene in which they appear together, the audience can sense the drama that will arise from the characters’ fundamental differences. Drama finally does arise when Pavel not only oversleeps, but also fails to relay an important message to Sergei.
Other reviewers have found this failure to deliver the message difficult to explain, and to some degree it is: the only possible reasons for Pavel to delay giving Sergei the message would be sympathy or fear. Pavel’s childish behaviour makes the audience lean towards the second reason, which involves a callow lack of logic: Sergei must eventually receive the message, and delaying passing it on only makes the situation worse. Although the delay creates suspense, Pavel as a character moves from being endearing to maddening. The gravity of the situation increases to a surprising degree, and throughout the audience continues to identify with Pavel to some extent because it is him, rather than Sergei, that the camera remains with for most of the film. However, Pavel’s craven self-preservation considerably decreases the audience’s sympathy for him.
Although the end of the film does bring a reasonably satisfying resolution, neither of the characters seems to have been changed by the experience: Pavel, though chastened, has learned nothing, while Sergei is his usual gruff self, although the audience knows that his life has been unalterably diminished. Is the director’s aim, in creating a character like Pavel, to critique a new generation of young men who live in a prolonged state of childhood and who are therefore incapable of acting as responsible adults? Or is he simply satirising urbanites who, having used technology to isolate themselves from reality, are unable to deal competently with that reality when they are forced to confront it?
For me, the most inexplicable element of this film was the use of a radioactive item as nemesis and means of revenge. Although it was a believable that this isolated land should be used as a dumping ground for such an object, its ultimate use in the narrative felt artificial and difficult to explain other than symbolically. If it was symbolic, exactly what it symbolised was unclear. Although I liked the conception and overall style of this film, Pavel’s character and the use of this symbolic object were profoundly unsatisfying.
