‘Dau’ Review: Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s Vast Cinematic Experiment in Historical World-Building Remains More Impressive From a Distance

More than six years after Ilya Khrzhanovsky premiered “DAU. Natasha” and “DAU. Degeneration” at the Berlin Film Festival — right before the global COVID lockdown — to a politely muted reception and limited distributor interest, you might think the moment has passed for another missive from the DAU Cinematic Universe. Turns out, however, that you can’t keep a good immersive multidisciplinary art project dau. Or even a flawed and ethically questionable one: Allegations of physical and psychological abuse on the sprawling set of this years-long undertaking have surfaced prominently, but not enough to deter the Venice Film Festival from programming “Dau” — seemingly, as implied by the back-to-basics title, Khrzhanovsky’s attempt to extract a quintessential dramatic epic from untold reams of material — in its main competition.

The ethics of that decision are further fodder for debate, though festival brass have defended the film on political grounds. Certainly, you can argue that Khrzhanovsky’s overarching thesis, with its heavy focus on the grim tools of Russian state oppression and imperialism through history, has gained in timeliness since we last checked in on the DAU project, before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The other question to ask, however, is whether “Dau” is such an undeniable artistic accomplishment as to merit all this back and forth — and on that, the jury is out.

Weighing in at just over 200 minutes (not including the quarter-hour interval bisecting its Venice presentation), and spanning four decades in the life of a physicist involved in the Soviet atom-bomb project, the film certainly announces itself as a grave and major work. But beneath the impressive, sometimes seizure-threatening sound and fury of its formal construction, “Dau” feels dramatically and rhetorically thin: It plays as an avant-garde counterpart to such American films as “Oppenheimer” and “The Brutalist” (whose Oscar-winning DP, Lol Crawley, is one of three credited here), which likewise portrayed the social and ideological turmoil of a historical era through the portrait of a single tortured man. The man in this case remains something of a cypher to the last.

The character is inspired by Lev Landau, a leading Soviet theoretical physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1962, and whose achievements included calculating the dynamics of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb. Landau’s own life story is eventual enough to sustain a conventional biopic, though of course “conventional” is not part of Khrzhanovsky’s mission. The film’s fictionalized protagonist, known only as Dau, is Greek-born, and played with gangly, wild-eyed physicality by the Greek-Russian musician Teodor Currentzis — whether or not Dau’s nationality was dictated by the casting, we never really learn the backstory of what brought him to the Soviet Union.

He is, however, effectively marked as an outsider from the off, beginning with his eccentric appearance and dress — for the first half of the film’s extensive timeline, he’s consistently clad in glaring red velvet against the sober neutrals of the men around him. He’s introduced in 1928, striding with purpose down the heaving, filthy, vermin-infested streets of Leningrad in a grimily kaleidoscopic sequence barely tamed from the dizzily cacophonous montage of disconnected imagery — bodies, blackboard calculations, archival shreds of war and strife — that begins (and bookends) the film.

It’s a vivid establishment of time and place, but we immediately lurch forward to mid-1930s Kharkiv, where we get better acquainted with Dau as a young rebel scientist thumbing his nose at the military industry that would like to employ him — arguing to his uniformed would-be recruiters that the job of the physicist is to discover new spaces, not defend existing territories. It’s the kind of principled stance that can only be beaten out of him by the state, but there’s plenty of time for that yet. The Kharkiv years also see him meet young working-class woman Nora (Radmila Shegoleva), cuing a marriage that will also be significantly corrupted in the hours to come.

In the late 1930s, facing a choice between cooperation or consignment to a penal colony, he’s finally absorbed into a state scientific research institute in Moscow, where the rest of the film bitterly unfolds — a semi-surreal, oppressively over-scaled place that steadily consumes his mind, his principles and his freedom, under the unforgiving surveillance of government interrogator Azhippo (Vladimir Azhippo). What release he can find comes via a parade of extramarital affairs that progressively darken the mood of his domestic life — a holding pattern of misery that indeed holds through the film’s second half. Rather than opening up as a character, Dau recedes from us as time ticks by: His gradual ruin illuminates little that the film hasn’t already made obvious about the living nightmare of this milieu.

Compensation come in a proliferation of visually and sonically startling setpieces that mostly serve to show off the unhinged dedication of the DAU project’s literal world-building. One fairly ordinary dialogue scene takes place atop an expansive steel grate suspended in mid-air; another at the foot of a gargantuan state sculpture surrounded by extras walking, for reasons unknown, at a perfect 45-degree angle; when Dau is violently attacked in the street, it’s against a mountain of cabbages scaled and loudly peeled by oblivious scavengers.

As a sheer feat of production design and crowd choreography, then, “Dau” is occasionally jaw-dropping, though it still offers only a glimpse of the huge, mad artistic and practical undertaking that DAU is — conceived as a kind of quasi-“Truman Show”-style experiment in which participants lived and worked full-time on a 24/7 set spanning 12,000 square meters. None of the fictional DAU films set within this colossal recreation can be as interesting as the wider view, and “Dau,” for all its grandiose ambition, is no exception. Khrzhanovsky himself has described the films as mere trailers for the larger project; it would take a more hybrid form of cinema to capture the scope and folly of what has been achieved.

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