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How would it be if Christopher Nolan got sidetracked while making Oppenheimer, and decided to spend 20 years and millions of dollars of other people’s money reconstructing the Los Alamos HQ in all its minute detail, which would be the site of a gigantic immersive multimedia project, releasing epic and sexually explicit sidebar movies about … someone who worked in the commissary … or a scary incidental guy from the CIA … before finally getting round to the fundamental main-event movie with Cillian Murphy as the A-bomb’s father?
Perhaps it would be something like Ilya Krzhanovsky’s authentically mad, obsessively sexual, and spectacularly pessimistic epic project about the Soviet scientist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau, or “Dau”, whose work spanned the 1920s to the postwar and cold war eras, and whose notional endorsement of free love the DAU movies escalate into a dissolute sex addiction. Khrzhanovsky gives this a kind of classical Hellenic distinction by fictionalising a Greek background for our mysterious horny hero, whose indulgences coexist with his self-questioning obsession with his own genius and loneliness. It would be vulgar and irrelevant to wonder if Khrzhanovsky, like any artist, is in fact working on a self-portrait. But you surely can’t work on a (still unfinished) project like this without a strong personal connection.
Here, at all events, is the latest Dau iteration, a more conventionally conceived biopic about Lev Landau (although we don’t see him getting the Nobel – perhaps that’s a separate film). Apparently this is the feature that Khrzhanovsky originally envisioned before the creative Big Bang that created the Dau multimedia universe. His first offshoot picture DAU. Natasha (2020) was about two women who work in the canteen of Dau’s research institute, a place drenched in sexual tension and political paranoia and violence. The next film to come was the grisly epic DAU. Degeneration (2020), set in the late 60s with Dau himself – still here a peripheral character – on his deathbed.
Now we have a more straightforward story, albeit one streaked with Boschian visions, and stroboscopic visual breakdowns. Dau, played by Greek-Russian musician and actor Teodor Currentzis, is a garrulous, brilliant, melancholy theoretical physicist touched with genius which the audience has to take on trust (none of the various setpiece speeches about quantum mechanics are assigned to him). He cheats on his wife Nora (Radmila Shchogolieva), humiliating her with his flagrant extramarital indulgences; he is interested in human nature, human behaviour and human ethics and the way in which these correlate with the coming revolution in physics.
Dau is also part of a consensus among scientists that their work should not be used for warlike purposes. This lands him in big trouble with the military authorities, particularly the terrifying bullet-headed KGB man Vladimir (Vladimir Azhippo), a chilling character from DAU.Degeneration. He is saved from prison by his friend Kruptisa (Anatoly Vasilyev), a fictional variant of the real Soviet scientist Pyotr Kapitsa – on condition that he swallows his pride and his principles and agrees to work on the bomb. Dau rewards Krupitsa by letting him down, vacillating and betraying him.
It is a mad, daunting, haunting film which somehow persuades you that Landau is at the sulphurous centre of Soviet tyranny. How is it that this figure has spawned, is spawning, this massive, proliferating, multiplatform, multimedia phenomenon, so bizarre, so detached from what we think of as the accepted commercial rules for any artwork, that it is still difficult to believe it exists at all? What an enigma it is – and what an adventure.
DAU screened at the Venice film festival.
