My Undesirable Friends: Part I • Last Air in Moscow (2024, Julia Loktev)

59/100

Easily the most remarkable thing about Loktev's epic documentary project (Part II: Exile, due sometime next year, will apparently also run somewhere around five hours) is that she began shooting about four months before Putin invaded Ukraine, with no expectation that war was imminent. Her original idea was simply to profile some of the courageous young women working for independent Russian station TV Rain, all of whom had recently been designated as "foreign agents" (and required to display that information on literally everything, even Instagram cat photos) for reporting news that the Kremlin didn't like. What happened in February 2022—Loktev, to her credit, hopped on a plane when it was still unclear whether massive troop movements at the border genuinely meant something, arriving the day before missiles were launched and capturing her subjects' stunned disbelief and anger in real time—anyway, what happened then obviously reconfigured the entire film...but I'm confident that the doc she'd thought she was making, about battling state repression, would've been quite good, even had Putin not lost his mind and set the world on fire.

Would it have run 3½ hours, though? 'Cause that's how long we observe these women before war breaks out, and those first three chapters (of five) feel pretty self-indulgent, their wheel-spinning shagginess justifiable only because we know what's coming. Nothing much actually happens for ages—TV Rain's employees have already been saddled with "the fuckery" (as they call Russia's foreign-agent disclaimer/warning, a giant block of text) at the outset and just keep railing against it, understandably but without much variation. Mostly, we just sorta hang with the gals, enjoying their gal-lows humor (get it?) and identifying with their frustration. Doing so at such length does create a productive illusion of friendship for the viewer (I became quite attached to Sonya and Ira in particular, despite Loktev's foregrounding of Anna and later Ksenia), which definitely heightens the bleak impact of chapter four (beautifully titled "The Expected Impossible"), as we see these vibrant, passionate journalists momentarily defeated, frozen in grief and hopelessness. It's chilling. Still, so much of those first three hours and change seems expendable, inessential, included mostly due to the filmmaker's adoration. (Entirely personal interludes involving friends/lovers who didn't want to be identifiable on camera, forcing Loktev to constantly shoot around them or blur their faces in post, could've been first on the chopping block. It's one thing to obscure a victim recounting abuse, quite another when it's just two people baking a cake and one of them's in visual witness protection for no stated reason.) A still-epic three-hour version would've more than covered all the bases and made the first half come across less like waiting for the other shoe (bombs) to drop.

Longest films I've seen theatrically in a single sitting (with at least one intermission in most cases, not sure about the Jacobs):

1. Sátántangó (7 hrs 19 mins)

2. Star-Spangled to Death (6 hrs 42 mins)

3. The Best of Youth (6 hrs 14 mins)

4. Little Dorrit (5 hrs 57 mins)

5. Carlos (5 hrs 26 mins; now 15 years and counting for my Assayas-loving friend who hasn't watched this due to its length)

6. My Undesirable Friends: Part I • Last Air in Moscow (5 hrs 24 mins)

7. 1900 (5 hrs 17 mins)

8. Smoking / No Smoking (4 hrs 58 mins)

9. The Kingdom II (4 hrs 40 mins)

10. The Kingdom (4 hrs 35 mins)

(I saw all of Kieślowski's Dekalog on the big screen, but over multiple days, plus I consider that to be ten films. And I'm not including Gance's Napoléon, which ran some 5½ hours when I recently rewatched it at home, because the cut that I saw at NYU in 1995 was significantly shorter. Likewise, it was the shorter U.S. theatrical cut of Fanny and Alexander that I saw at Theatre 80 St. Mark's; full version was at home.)

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Normally, for a multi-part title like this, I follow the one-sheet's lead, and here that's colon followed by em dash: My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow. Onscreen, however, My Undesirable Friends appears alone in the frame, then there's a cut to

Part I Last Air in Moscow

Hopefully that's displaying as typed, with a significant space between "Part I" and "Last Air in Moscow." As with Pink Floyd • The Wall, which did something similar, I've decided that an interpunct more accurately reflects what's onscreen than does an em dash, which Loktev and/or her designer could easily have employed but did not. (I have to use some symbol because there's no reliable means of creating extra space between words—that'll be displayed different ways by different applications. Would be nice if tabs/spaces were treated the same everywhere, but they're not.)