Dir. Sarah Turner, UK , 2009, 118 mins.
Review by Robert Barry
The film opens with a mist of steam dancing on waves. It's an image that will return later, in a film that is all about returning, the revenants that come back to haunt us. A voice-over quickly establishes the film's deeply personal tone. A confession composed of precisely articulated T's. She sounds, our narrator, who is the film-maker herself, like an English poet. I'm reminded of Carol Ann Duffy. All this talk of “the rules,” “the project,” “what we agreed,” makes me think of a teenager forced to recite at a family gathering.
Half cinematic essay, half dreamlike driftwork and poetic reverie, artist Sarah Turner's latest work was also supposed to be a kind of kino-therapy. Everything we see is filmed through the window of a moving train – the Trans-Siberian Express – as it hurtles through the former USSR . In combination with the ever-present self-reflexive voice-over (“Why did I film it like this?” she asks herself, “Without any people.”), we gradually reconstruct the story, or rather two stories, one the ghost of the other.
In 1988, Turner and a group of friends made this same journey and somewhere along the way an accident happened, resulting in the death of one friend and retrograde amnesia for Turner herself. So in reliving the trauma, carrying out the same train journey once more, the hope was to undo its damage, not, as the case seems to have been, to conjure up more ghosts, more trauma. Though Perestroika exploits certain tropes of autobiography, its director insists it is a fiction, albeit “a fiction that exploits some of the facts of my life,” in order to explore “the relationship between photography, death, the passing of time, and the changing landscape.” For now, the trauma is less personal than environmental. Twenty years ago this landscape was covered in snow.
Perestroika presents a sometimes profound, occasionally beautiful, and frequently haunting film. It takes us, both literally and figuratively, on a journey that is as much to do with inner as outer space.
At times it seems both too personal and not quite personal enough, as though it were circulating around a certain impenetrable core, which it dare not quite touch and only its insiders really know about. A great deal of its story remains untold and unknown, unless and until you read the press release after it. And here perhaps is the chief problem with the film. For all its occasional wonder, it can't help but feel like something of a failed experiment – both on a personal and an artistic level. Having failed as therapy, it fails just as much to tell the story of its own failure, preferring to cover its tracks with a kind of pseudo-ish profundity that lacks the insights it clearly thinks it is communicating.
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