The vast and unfortunately ever-growing archive of films about societies succumbing to war fever gains a memorable new entry with “Mr. Nobody Against Putin.” The main character and co-director is Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, the videographer and events coordinator for a primary school in Karabash, a petrol refinery town of about 10,000 located in the Ural Mountains. Most of Talankin’s days are spent recording events at the school. In 2022, Russian premier Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine, sparking the bloodiest European conflict since World War II. Talankin found himself behind a camera at a time when his school’s curriculum was being remade by the Russian government, mostly to propagandize young people into docile tools of the state who believe their motherland can do no wrong.
There’s a lot to recommend this movie, which was put together in Copenhagen by Talankin’s co-director David Borenstein from video Talankin smuggled out of Russia. But one of its more quietly revelatory qualities is how it captures the way authoritarianism accelerates during wartime. One day, students, faculty, and administrators are going about their business, and the next, the fax machine in the principal’s office is spitting out an announcement of the New Federal Education Policy. Hours that Talankin used to spend mentoring students are now spent amassing massive amounts of repetitive video of teachers reading state-written material to their students, then uploading them “to some mysterious government database.”
This understandably alarms Talankin, an antiwar progressive who hung a pro-democracy flag in his office and enjoys arguing politics with more right-wing colleagues. As the story unfolds over the next two years and the war claims the lives of students he was close with, Talankin feels increasingly guilty, because while he’s fuming privately about his school’s (and his town’s) complicity and capitulation, he sees younger protesters on TV getting clubbed for opposing the invasion.
Talankin impulsively tenders his resignation, but after contemplating the decision, realizes that if he could convince the principal to let him retract his resignation, he could use the position to collect material for a movie that documents a Russian school’s transformation into one small cog in a war machine, and how the process supplants everything that makes schooling useful to begin with. A project like that won’t stop a war, but it could at least undermine the motherland’s claims that the Russian people have unanimously rallied behind it.
The challenge is how to do all that without getting beaten, tortured, jailed, or worse. (A 2023 law decreed that any Russian who opposed the Ukraine occupation was guilty of treason, a capital offense.) Talankin doesn’t try very hard to keep a low profile. After an account of an all-hands-on-deck teacher’s meeting to discuss how to counter the school’s increasing rate of students failing their classes, there’s a cut to Talankin and a couple of colleagues decompressing afterward, and we hear him off-camera suggesting that “the reason they are failing is all the bullshit…’Go, Russia! Hooray for nuclear weapons!’ is all we have here now.” Talankin even removes a row of K’s taped across the panes of a row of picture windows—the Cyrillic letter of the Russian alphabet adopted by pro-war forces, meaning a pobedu (“for victory”) or zapad (“west”)—and replaces them with X’s.
It’s fascinating to watch this man’s internal struggle become externalized through filmmaking. It’s obvious that a lot of it has been massaged in the editing to create a more “movie-like” rhythm and triumphant feeling, to the point where you start to imagine the Hollywood remake, probably starring Bill Skarsgard. The score, credited to Michal Rataj and Jonas Struck, runs the gamut from just right to way too much. And there a few moments where the shots of Talankin seeming to react to something that just happened in the story feel self-consciously posed. Talankin the leading man is a natural camera subject, charming and often heartbreakingly vulnerable, but it’s clear even in this inaugural effort that Talankin the filmmaker needs to keep him on a short leash.
These are minor objections to a major effort, though. Talankin, with Borenstein’s might assist, has made a movie that combines a passionate heart and generosity of spirit with what in the United States we’d call counterculture humor, like the kind showcased in mid-century fiction and cinema like “Catch-22,” “Apocalypse Now,” where the only people questioning the mindlessness and corruption of their culture are those who are smart enough to identify exactly what’s defective but powerless to anything but make hardboiled jokes about it.
Talankin has a gift for letting ridiculous people look ridiculous with hardly any prompting, as when he asks the school’s history teacher and official Kremlin representative—a dull man and godawful communicator whose face suggests a gangrenous James Woods—which historical figures he’d most like to have met, and he replies with a list of sadistic madmen and genocide enablers, including Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, chief of police under Josef Stalin, who designed the gulag system. But this is also a movie that concedes the humanity of everyone it includes (except Putin, a dead-eyed thug who thinks speaking softly means he’s civilized). When he receives an award for his teaching, he genuinely seems to think it’s because he’s a great teacher, not because he’s Putin’s representative. But Talankin gives him the gift of humanization anyway: during a graduation sequence, there’s a cut to the toady wiping a tear from his eye, proud as any parent.
Purely on a craft level, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” is skillful and engrossing, never more so than when it’s capturing wrenchingly painful moments in people’s lives with a detachment that ensures that the focus on the subjects rather than Talankin. The strongest is a funeral for a student who was drafted and died in Ukraine. Talankin explains that he didn’t get video because, with Russia dug deep into the occupation, it might’ve caused a hostile reaction, so he recorded audio only. Hearing the dead soldier’s mother wailing inconsolably while staring at a black screen puts the entire experience in perspective in a way that even the most eloquent narration never could.
It’s also fascinating to see the shooting style evolve as Talankin stops being a mere record-keeper and begins using the camera expressively. The shots become more varied and dynamic, the use of streetlamp and sunlight more painterly. The arrangement of faces and bodies within frames becomes more elegant. But there are also times, even in the more emotional later scenes, when the movie lets images speak for themselves. Notice, for instance, how the boys’ haircuts get collectively shorter as the story goes on, and how they start wearing camouflage outerwear, and how the school hallways seem to grow longer and colder. In the opening section of the movie, Talankin says he knows that if he’s to rise to the level of the era he’s chronicling, he’ll have to stop being a videographer and become a director. And he did.
A side note: Talankin says early in the movie that as his duties expanded, the school hired a second videographer to assist him. This explains all the shots of Talankin operating his own camera, talking to faculty while being observed through a zoom lens, walking up and down stairwells, and so on. The credits list the two main camerapersons as “Pavel Talankin” and “Anonymous.” As much as I wish that I could find out who this person is and write them a fan letter, there are cases where it’s better not to know things, and this is one of them. Anonymous, if you’re reading this: great work, and stay strong.
