Shaman spin on light v dark

Russian cinema has been given a lift by the vampire movie Night Watch, which has attracted much interest in the US.

Something is stirring in Russia. A vampire movie, called Night Watch, based on a novel by a child psychiatrist, and directed by a little-known commercials director from Kazakhstan, has become a phenomenon.

Part of a trilogy, it's now one of the most successful films made in Russia, selling 1.5 million DVDs.

Fox studios has snapped it up for distribution in the West, and has coughed up tens of millions for the third and final part of the trilogy, which will be filmed in Hollywood next year.

Even Quentin Tarantino loves it, in no small part because it's a tribute to his hipster style of film-making, and has breathlessly called it "magnificent'.

I met the director, Timur Bekmambetov, a bear-like and immensely media-savvy figure (his mother and sister are journalists), earlier this year in Central Europe.

He was attending the Czech film festival in Karlovy Vary, and had a gentle, watchful and somewhat self-effacing manner quite at odds with the Grand Guignol pomp of his movie.

A few weeks ago I met him again, in a five-star hotel a short walk from Red Square.

Russian cinema, that marvellously austere and cerebral theatre of lost hopes, has been in the doldrums for years.

The only people who funded Russian films were gangsters laundering dirty money, and the people trying to make them were mainly down-at-heel poets of celluloid, reaching for an audience that no longer existed.

Night Watch is a familiar enough fantasy of witches, shape-shifters and vampires who live among us as everyday folk. By day they look normal, but by night the masks slip to reveal the truly alarming and feral.

The forces of "light" and the forces of "dark" have agreed to a truce to keep a balance and to not involve humankind in their demonic and ghastly affairs.

But a sequence of events around a troubled young woman threatens to destabilise this ancient treaty. And will the main character, played by Konstantin Khabensky, be able to prevent his son from going over to the dark side?

Sergei Lukyanenko's bestselling novel has proved effective (even if Bekmambetov junked 70 per cent of it) when it comes to creating a whole new genre in the movies - a slick Hollywood-style supernatural blockbuster with slatherings of queasy Russian social realism, like the smell of borscht in haunted high-rises that suffer from concrete cancer.

The magnificent paradox is that the paranormal Night Watch is the most profoundly normal thing to have happened in the Russian film industry for years.

In almost every way, Night Watch is flashy and derivative. There are the borrowings from Jonathan Glazer's Radiohead music videos, the inevitable lifts from Buffy, The Omen, Blade, The Matrix, The Crow, and so on.

And yet there's a dash, a moral equivalence at work that is new in this kind of mainstream movie.

Where Star Wars has a simplistic view of good and evil, Bekmambetov has come up with a completely different perspective, informed, he says, by the shamanism of his grandfather.

"Night Watch is shamanistic film-making," he asserts, as we sit in a small conference room. He is as personable as ever, round and bearded. But didn't he have a Muslim upbringing?

"Kazakhstan is not really Islamic," he explains. "Its original culture is nature - gods and the wind.

"The American producers we now have on board have had very great problems with all this, because American film culture has very strong rules and everything has to be explained."

Unlike Star Wars, I suggest, Night Watch is about a balance of light and dark. Even the supposed good guy has a little of the villain in him.

"Good and bad is a very childish and naive concept," Bekmambetov says. "Good means what's good for you and bad what's bad for you. It's about freedom and responsibility. Dark represents freedom but light represents responsibility."

And which is he? "Like everyone, I'm in between. I have a fight going on inside all the time."

Rumours of deals with Russian DVD pirates turn out to be true, according to the director.

"We contacted the pirates and got them to distribute the DVD," he confirms. "So they protected us during the theatrical release.

"We don't know the rules," he laughs. "We are Russian, playing our own game."



ON SCREEN

What: Night Watch, cult Russian horror film
Where & when: Sneak previews this weekend at Academy Cinema. Opens January 19 there and at Rialto Hamilton.

- INDEPENDENT