‘Limonov: The Ballad’ Review: Ben Whishaw Is The Slippery Star Of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Exhilarating Punk-Poet Biopic – Cannes Film Festival
19.05.2024 - 16:19
/ deadline.com
In the Moscow Times’ obituary for Eduard Limonov, who died four years ago aged 77, writer Mark Galeotti summed up the poet-turned-politician in two simple sentences: “Was Limonov a visionary or a poser, an artist or a politician, a leftist or a rightist? The answer to all of them is, of course, yes.” This is key to understanding Kirill Serebrennikov’s latest movie, a boundary-blasting biopic that simply drips with punk-rock energy, revealing everything and nothing about a slippery character whose modus operandi was reinvention from the get-go and for whom consistency really was the hobgoblin of small minds.
Limonov, the poet, fits into a long line of miscreant artists, such as writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, who co-wrote the manifesto of the Russian Futurist group (“A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”) in 1912, and Dziga Vertov, the avant-garde director whose Man with a Movie Camera (1929) changed the face of documentary altogether. Serebrennikov’s film draws on both these visionaries, and the result is a film that just won’t behave itself, taking the political rock operatics of his 2018 film Summer to exciting new extremes.
Key to is success is star Ben Whishaw, who did some of the preparation needed for a film like this when he appeared in Todd Haynes’ 2007 Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, playing the folk singer as an incarnation of symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. That film was surely a touchstone for Serebrennikov, who details Limonov’s life from his years as a young man in Kharkov in the late ’60s to his death, the difference being that, unlike Haynes, Serebrennikov isn’t too fussed about chronology. Which is why we first encounter Limonov in exile in France in the ’70s, where he tells an interviewer that “writers must
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