Of Freaks and Men

Brother established Alexei Balabanov as the Russian answer to Quentin Tarantino with its slickly nihilistic tale of a young ex-soldier who finds his calling as a hitman in the post-Soviet anarchy of St. Petersburg. In his latest, Of Freaks and Men, Balabanov establishes himself as his own man in this tale of ex-bourgeois who seek their calling as pornographers in the pre-Soviet complacency of the same city. Shot in oppressive sepia with intertitles, Freaks seems part silent-film oddity, part private nightmare -- a perverse, precious tour-de-force reminiscent of Buñuel and Jan Svankmayer.

Three families interconnect through the media of photography and the nascent "cinematograph." Johann, a sinister burgher in a Magrittish derby, makes a living selling photos of naughty girls being spanked. His sister works as a maid for an ailing engineer whose daughter Liza is one of Johann's customers through his assistant, the Nosferatu-like Viktor. Then there's Dr. Sastrov, his adopted Siamese twins, and his elegant, blind wife, who has an unexpected taste for the rough stuff. A brittle, cryptic allegory of fetishism, sado-masochism, voyeurism, and the persistence of love, Freaks is the anally controlled opposite of Brother's free-form exuberance. Common to both is a bizarre sense of humor and a deep sense of pathos -- Balabanov's mastery of the freakish and the humane marks him as a world filmmaker to watch.

-- Peter Keough