Written by David Dufour, Image courtesy of SCAD Savannah Film Festival
Every now and then a director comes around who says, “I know all the elements that make up a genuine, human bond.” Sometimes, these same directors turn out to be right. They boldly set out to investigate that which pulls us together, breaks us apart and drives us crazy. You might say this is all a bit lofty, and you’d be right. It is. But we’re fortunate enough to have a director like Juho Kuosmanen, whose latest film “Compartment No. 6” prods at these questions of friendship and love.
The movie doesn’t have the answers, though. Based on a novel of the same name and set just after the fall of the Soviet Union, it follows Laura (Seidi Haarla), a Finnish archeology student taking a train to Murmansk to see famous petroglyphs. She’s joined in her compartment by a Russian miner named Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov). On a surface level, it sounds like they have nothing in common, right? In the beginning, we have our own assumptions about who these people are, but these expectations are turned on us in all the right ways.
The theme of loneliness is bubbling under the surface here. It’s in the way the characters look at each other, talk about their pasts, even the brutal snowstorms just outside the train. We see Ljoha, despite his gloomy and gruff temperament, flirting with Laura — with no success.
Laura avoids any kind of vulnerability. When Ljoha asks if she has a partner, she says yes but never says their name. She later tells him about her girlfriend Irina, who she calls the most beautiful person in the world. Irina has become distant towards her. During several train stops, Laura uses a payphone to reach Irina, but she typically gets the ringer. We hear only static and the phone beeping again and again. And when she does finally answer, the conversation is brief and awkward.
When they reach an overnight stop, Ljoha says that he knows a babushka (we are never sure exactly how) in the town where they’re spending the night. He’s able to convince Laura to join him at the babushka’s house, where they drink and tell stories.
The intimacy is in what’s not being said — the trip to the babushka, how Laura gradually opens herself to Ljoha’s friendship.
After drinking wine in the train’s dining area, Laura hugs Ljoha and starts kissing him. It’s the only kiss in the movie, and he turns his head away in what seems like shyness. But we aren’t exactly sure why he’s so reserved to Laura’s affection. It’s just enough ambiguity to show us that, while this may not blossom into romance, these two are developing complicated feelings for each other.
At first, it seems like “Compartment No. 6” could be a love story. After all, it follows two strangers who meet and take a long journey together. But Kuosmanen had other plans. He deliberately changes the dynamic between the two main characters from the novel, which is mainly an allegory for the protagonists’ complicated past with Soviet Russia. Kuosmanen said that he wanted to defy the audiences’ expectations of a love story. He didn’t want to portray romantic love, but pure connection.
For a movie so deeply centered around loneliness, “Compartment No. 6” is about relationships. It shows two people falling in love, just in their own way. Maybe this comes as a shock since we rarely hear stories of Platonic love, but, perhaps, this is testimony to why we should.
