Shaman: A taiga duet for the violin and Jew’s harp

Dmitri (Igor Gotesman) and his horse in Shaman

I confess, I was a bit gun-shy of joint French productions set in northern or central Asia, after the unfortunately-pretentious Ulzhan. The 1996 French-Russian film Shaman, though, proved to be far more watchable and engaging. The film is centred around two escaped prisoners from a gulag in Siberia, and the efforts of the fish-out-of-water Dmitri to survive in a hostile environment.

The relationships between the violinist Dmitri (Igor Gotesman) and the Sakha, or Yakut, prisoner Anatoli (Spartak Fedotov), and later between Dmitri and his horse, undergird the whole of the film. As with Ulzhan, there is a journey underway with a destination at the end in mind, that never gets reached. Also as with Ulzhan, there is a mystical-spiritual element to this journey that is consonant with shamanism and which also incorporates some arthouse filmic conceits. Unlike Ulzhan, however, there are real stakes built up for the characters, and the beliefs and worldview of the Sakha are made to carry some real weight. Dmitri actually manages to be likeable in spite of his early ineptitude – in part because we can see early on that he cares about and respects Anatoli.

Warning: spoilers below.

Dmitri, a violinist from Moscow, mounts an escape from a labour camp in Siberia after discovering a prayer tree decked with flags and a herd of wild Yakut horses. He tells his fellow-prisoner Anatoli about what he discovers, and Anatoli helps him to smuggle his violin out of the camp, and rope and tame one of the horses. Anatoli advises Dmitri to take off his prisoner tag and hang it from the tree if he wants to make it far. The two of them ride off but are shot at by the camp guards, and Anatoli is hit in the back. The wound proves deadly. The Sakha believes that his fate is because of the anger of the spirits, who are punishing him for greed in taking an extra horse from the herd. The disbelieving Dmitri asks him how he knows, and Anatoli replies that he is a shaman. His dying wish is for Dmitri to place the amulets he brought out from the camp around his body.

Dmitri’s subsequent attempts to survive in the taiga range from the serious to the comical as he has to outwit and outrun cold, hunger, wolves, and his pursuers in the Red Army and Soviet police (who have helicopters and jeeps). He makes some early mistakes that nearly cost him his life and freedom – like lighting a fire in the open, or letting his horse run free before it trusts him. Everything in the taiga has a spirit. And the spirits of the taiga – so Anatoli warns Dmitri – do not come running with a baby bottle in hand. Dmitri is forced to sharpen his wits and his survival skills.

Dmitri manages to survive, however, it seems in part as a result of the intervention of the spirits. Along the way, Dmitri runs across a cast of supporting characters who are as unpredictable as the taiga itself. In some cases, the circumstances in which he meets them are so surreal that we are led to wonder if these are truly people or visions of spirits sent to help or hinder him. He meets a part-time poacher who works on a reindeer-herding kolkhoz. He meets Anatoli’s kindly but dying mother. He meets a trapper and his son who want to turn him in to the Soviet government for the reward money. And – my personal favourite – he meets a motorbicycling, leather jacket-sporting, aviator goggles-rocking, ambiguously-mad ‘Cossack to the Tsar’ who calls Dmitri ‘muzhik’ and helps him rescue his loyal Yakut horse, which he deeply admires but advises Dmitri to have shod lest it get a limp. In a rowdy Siberian bar he also meets a Buryat blacksmith to shoe his horse – who is the spitting image of his friend Anatoli. And on board one of the ice-bound lake ships he meets a pigeon-breeder who clearly doesn’t have it all together.

He eventually makes his way to Irkutsk, where he sells his horse to a travelling Roma whose daughters admire it. We see that in Irkutsk he can’t really ‘make it’ after having spent so long in the taiga. He seems shell-shocked among crowds and on streets, and he doesn’t even have the capacity to drink vodka after so long. He instinctively flees from the police on the streets, who don’t recognise him or care that he’s there. He finally avails himself of a public shower and hits on a nurse, who takes him out for dinner and a dance. He can’t decide what he wants off the menu, just saying ‘I want to eat.’ And of course it seems he’s forgotten how to properly use a knife and fork. This rather amuses his date. The nurse takes him back to her apartment in Irkutsk and asks him to stay. Dmitri opens his violin case briefly, but then puts it away. He then takes out Anatoli’s Jew’s harp and begins playing it as the sun rises over the lake. In the last scene we see Dmitri riding his horse out of Irkutsk as a train goes by the opposite way, and a Roma boy is shown playing Dmitri’s violin.

End spoilers.

The score of Shaman, though sparse, is integrally important to this film, and much of it consists of violin playing in harmony with the Jew’s harp – representing the coöperation of the spirit of Anatoli with Dmitri, and sometimes the inner conflict in Dmitri as he tries to make his way back to Moscow through the taiga. As is to be expected, the cinematography is broad and sweeping, and deliberately dwarfs the vulnerable Dmitri and his horse against the frigid landscape, which ultimately conquers him. That includes dense evergreen forests, fathomless snowdrifts, and vast frozen lakes (including the great Baikal) stretching out every way toward the horizon in which are caught boats ranging from canoes to great modern shipping tankers, rusting uselessly in the ice. The subtext is clear: modern technology is not necessarily of avail against the elements. Not a particularly Soviet sentiment!

The film delights in shocking us out of complacency, and it does this often by contrasting the vast, bleak winterscapes of Siberia with the intrusions of modern Soviet technology. The Sakha kolkhoz features yurts with radio antennæ. The Russian village which might as well have been a seventeenth-century Cossack colony is governed from a prefab police station with a Soviet flag. And then all of a sudden we see Dmitri riding his horse in front of an industrial shipping-yard in Irkutsk. The juxtaposition is jarring and it suddenly seems like we are in a different movie: we are made to feel the same disorientation and ‘unreality’ of this urban landscape that Dmitri does as he wanders into town.

The acting ability of Igor Gotesman is exemplary here – and he can do it well without having to speak. His long, drawn face and piercing blue eyes manage to convey excellently the vulnerable ingenuousness of his early escape, and also the experience of the weather-beaten survivor toward the end. He is an excellent counterpart to the normally-jovial Spartak Fedotov, who can become convincingly commanding at the drop of a pin – their unlikely friendship is rendered believable by their shared struggle. Their friendship bolsters the thematic tension in the film between mistrust of strangers (sometimes genuinely justified) and the need for mutual assistance in the face of the harsh environment. Another thematic consideration, consonant with the shamanic relationship with the wilderness in such a marginal biome, is the thin and often permeable distinction between sanity and madness. Very often it’s the ‘mad’ ones who prove to be most benign and helpful – like the pigeon-breeder living on the ship, or the Cossack biker who helps Dmitri rescue his horse.

I’ve made several comparisons of this film to Ulzhan up front, which I feel probably isn’t fair. Shaman is a far superior film, one which is quite a bit more subdued and ‘realistic’, but actually manages to plumb deeper into its material than the quixotic meandering treasure-hunt which is left unresolved in the other film. Perhaps a better comparison would be to the Kazakhstani prison-break-and-survival film Begletsy, though Shaman is more of a buddy flick than a romance, and the questions posed and answered by the film are quite different. Shaman gets off to a glacially slow start, but it convincingly builds up the sympathy and dramatic tension one would expect from a survival film of this kind.